After-School Activities

By SANFORD PINSKER

ALL THE SAD YOUNG LITERARY MEN
By Keith Gessen
242 pages. Viking Press. $24.95.

The Romantic poet William Wordsworth summed up a generation of fellow writers this way: “We Poets in our youth begin in gladness/But thereof in the end come despondency and madness.” Closer to our age, modernist poets such as Robert Lowell, Delmore Schwartz, and John Berryman gave Wordsworth’s lines a manic-depressive spin.

Taking the measure of writers and their age is, by now, a long-established tradition for fiction writers as well. One thinks, for example, of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise (1920), a novel out to explain Jazz Age mores to an older, decidedly stuffier generation. Instantly famous, Fitzgerald would publish a short-story collection, All the Sad Young Men, six years later; he was then 30 years old and his decline had begun.

Keith Gessen’s All the Sad Young Literary Men means to bring the sad-funny news about his generation to the likes of me—that is, a person who does not know quite what to do when Gessen describes a character as “the Edith Wharton of text messaging.” Edith Wharton I know; but text messaging? What, I wonder quizzically, does a great writer’s thickly textured paragraphs have to do with the “u r mbf” crowd?

All the Sad Young Literary Men is Gessen’s debut novel but he has, I’m told, already established himself as a hot intellectual property, partly for his take-no-prisoners essays and book reviews in New York magazine and partly for n+1, the red-hot journal of literature, politics, and culture he helped found. Add the fact that Gessen was born in Russia (he came to America as a young child), and no doubt some will link him with the young, Russian-Jewish novelist, Gary Shteyngart. Unfortunately, Gessen is, at least not yet, no Shteyngart. True enough, Gessen's paragraphs have their moments but they hardly match the intensity and sheer ebullience that Sheyngart packs into every page of The Russian Debutante’s Handbook or Absurdistan. Even more off-putting, Gessen lacks a novelist’s touch for distinguishing characters: his troika of protagonists often seem interchangeable, and this is doubly so for their various love interests.

Still, All the Sad Young Literary Men held my attention because I am a sucker for bright novels about intellectual sad sacks. What links Mark Grossman, Keith (no last name given), the novel’s abiding narrative voice, and Sam Mitnick together are ambitions that have turned sour in their mid-to-late 20s—this is the sadness Gessen’s protagonists share: “The success we’d glimpsed, that we had smelled with our noses... was denied us. We might make it but it would not be for many years, and we would not be so beautiful as we were....”

What Gessen’s protagonists do best is worry and procrastinate. Sam’s great defining project is nothing less than to write the “great Zionist novel.” Alas, as his Israeli girlfriend points out, he has no feel, no love, for the land, and he can’t speak, or write, a paragraph of Hebrew. No matter. Sam has an advance from a publisher and every confidence that he can outstrip the likes of Leon Uris’s Exodus, a novel that, for him, reeks of sentimentality and bad writing. The result are willies of the first order every time he checks his name into a Google search and discovers, to his horror, that he is “shrinking.” Even worse (and possibly funnier), Sam’s sluggish Zionist epic leads him to describe his present condition as “the age when his never-to-be-written masterpiece had begun to outweigh the masterpieces he was going to write.”

Mark suffers from similar night sweats. He divides his life (unequally) among a long-in-the-making dissertation on the Mensheviks, skirt-chasing, and sweaty work-out sessions in Syracuse University’s gym. And finally there is Keith: he spent a good deal of his time at Harvard wondering about “roundness of character” and whether those around him were speaking rot. Many readers will understandably give him a last name—Gessen—and they may or may not be right in this; but it is certainly true that Keith leaves Harvard and quickly begins writing for high-shelf magazines.

One could argue that nothing much has changed in terms of how young intellectuals conduct their lives. Elizabeth Hardwick once described the raucous parties hosted by Partisan Review as characterized by too much smoking, too much drinking, and too many clothes on the floor. With the exception of chain smoking, Gessen’s Ivy Leaguers could easily slip into Hardwick’s memories of another time, another place.

Gessen is positioned nicely for a long, fruitful career—as editor of an influential new journal and as the author of a novel published by a major press he has “connections.” I wish him well but feel obliged to add this caveat: a slightly older generation of Jewish-American writers has discovered that it is often easier to get a first or second novel published than a third or fourth one. Why so? Because as more and more small publishing houses are gobbled up by conglomerates, what matters above all else is the bottom line of one’s balance sheet. If your first few novels don’t sell briskly enough, you could be out of the fiction business faster than you can say "mid-life crisis."

Granted, some young Jewish-American writers (one thinks of Allegra Goodman, Jonathan Safran Foer, Dara Horn) are the exceptions rather than the unhappy rule. Keith Gessen may well join their ranks and if and when he does, I think he’ll see whole new dimensions of what it means to number oneself among the no-longer-quite-so-young literary folks.