All the Sad Young Literary Men

Keith Gessen’s first novel chronicles the minor struggles of Sam, Keith and Mark, three intellectuals enduring the common travails of the privileged twentysomething: the search for love and a respectable career. Gessen, an editor at n+1, weaves together the three loosely connected stories with beauty and perceptiveness, nailing his characters’ muddled postadolescent enterprises with humor and wit. But the author’s strength is also his weakness: Sam, Mark and Keith are so similar—and so annoying—that the book’s insights become monotonous.

Mark is a recently divorced grad student slogging through a dissertation on the Mensheviks. He constantly compares everyday situations to his studies, a habit irritating not only to the women he dates but also to the reader. Sam, meanwhile, is a self-conscious would-be academic consumed by the Israel-Palestine conflict (he aspires to write a Zionist epic though he’s not even a practicing Jew) and, more trivially, by the shrinking number of hits his name turns up in Google (he even calls the company and asks them to “shift the algorithm a little” to fix the problem). Keith, whose story is written in the first person, is a political writer and the most likable of the three. The son of Russian immigrants, he struggles with his broken family, his disappointment with contemporary American politics and the social pressures of being a student at Harvard.

Gessen unfolds the characters’ three tales simultaneously, ostensibly so we can find meaning in the similarities and differences among these sad literary youngsters. But the three protagonists blur into one another, leaving the reader to confusedly flip back and forth between chapters, trying to remember who did what.

—Kate Lowenstein

Gessen reads Apr 16, 2008 at McNally Robinson Booksellers.