All the Sad Young Literary Men is not about the experience of Iranian refugees. It's not about abused women, growing up gay, gang life, dying, or any of those other scintillating tragedies that turn our pages. No, Keith Gessen's debut novel is about young, highly educated white males living in New York, Boston, and Syracuse. It's not about war-torn Palestine-- it's about American Sam thinking about Palestine, then thinking about writing a book about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, then standing in Palestine eating an ice cream sandwich and wondering where the damn tanks are. If you're avoiding your dissertation right now and are momentarily bored with online pornography and your sluggish inbox, then this may be just the book for you.
AtSYLM follows three college kids to the adulthood of late 20's, early 30's. Mark lives in New York in a young and doomed marriage while translating Russian technical manuals. Sam, in Boston, dates two women and dreams of writing the Great Zionist Epic. "Sam," his Israeli girlfriend reminds him, "you can't even read Hebrew." And then there is Keith, who by all indications seems to be the author himself. Keith is studying at Harvard and lusting after Al Gore's daughter while listening to her lustily fumble with his roommate through thin dorm-room doors.
AtSYLM reminds me of the life in academia I'm glad to be missing out on. Gessen presents the foolish, sweet, frustrating moments of a particular sort of life-- being awakened in the campus gym by your undergrad students, daydreaming about the apartment you'll be able to buy after you write the book you haven't started, looking through the diaries of women you sleep with for reassurance of your attractiveness. Sam's, Keith's, and Mark's lives are told with an even, sober humor, as if Gessen is showing us what one could laugh at if one were the laughing sort. This humor is primarily derived from the smallness of his characters' values, victories, and defeats. The self-image of all three characters is dependent on the internet. Keith wistfully recalls, "I was big, for a while there-- reading my email each day was like watching a parade...Oh, you should have seen my inbox!"
"There is the event, which simply happens, and the interpretation, which never ends," Gessen writes. His characters certainly do a lot of pondering about their love lives, their careers, and Russian history. But there are few clear answers in AtSYLM. The lessons that Gessen imparts are unstated, but insinuated in the telling. Embroiled in a college cafeteria discussion of sex, Keith posits, "Just as sex itself should be consensual, so should the definition of sex. What I think we all want is an act about which people can say: That was it. That was the deed." When someone suggests that maybe they should ask some girls, Gessen narrates, "We all looked at him for a moment, with a mixture of annoyance and surprise."
AtSYLM feels retrospective-- we are never truly in the passion of the moment with the characters. Instead, we are with Gessen looking back at events fictitious or real and shaking our heads with amusement and interest but no visceral engagement. It's a cool read-- something to ponder on a damp, introverted day without much emotional commitment. The book will primarily appeal to academics, as they account for most of the people interested in reading about academics. But those sad, literary men out there will get a few derisive smiles and some wisdom out of All the Sad Young Literary Men.