The Sad-Funny News

By BENJAMIN POLLAK

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

“You are all a lost generation,” Gertrude Stein famously told Ernest Hemingway. That was in the 20s, the age of jazz and Prohibition, the dizzying post-war years that produced a generation of young writers who had come of age in the trenches of Europe. But what would an older intellectual, as Stein was at the time, say to a young writer of my age, someone who belonged to the post-9/11 generation of cell phones, instant messages, and GPS—the generation that can be found and tracked down with a click of a button or a few terse acronyms launched into cyberspace?

I suspect that the writers whose works will come to define my generation won’t be found in bohemian exile in Paris (the exchange rate is too steep), but they might very well be paying the skyrocketing rent in hipster Brooklyn, where Keith Gessen makes his home. Gessen, a founding editor of n + 1 magazine, has recently published his first novel, All the Sad Young Literary Men. Borrowing its title from a collection of stories by that other great writer of the Lost Generation, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gessen’s novel cuts a small slice out of the late ‘90s and early 2000s, depicting the ambitions and disappointments of three young men who stumble through the novel beneath the weight of their gargantuan egos and no-less-capacious reserves of self-doubt.

It’s always an odd sensation to see oneself reflected in another person, whether fictional or real; and, sad young literary man that I am, I found Gessen’s novel both charming and mortifying. Reading it was a constant battle between my vanity and my conscience. Am I really so self-absorbed, so self-righteous, so joyless,my conscience would ask? Meanwhile, my vanity was gloating over every neat turn of phrase and clever allusion, as if I’d written them myself.

But what would that older intellectual make of all this? What would a writer or scholar of my parents’ generation think of Gessen’s sad young scribblers? Would he or she snidely remark that we are, as I sometimes suspect, the generation lost within ourselves while the world implodes around us? When I read Sanford Pinsker’s review of All the Sad Young Literary Men, I had an opportunity to find out.

Pinsker, an emeritus professor at Franklin and Marshall College and the author of more books and articles on Jewish American fiction than I can count, is something of a role model for young scholars like me. Aside from his academic credentials, however, I knew little about him. A few clicks of the mouse later, I had discovered an online bio that informed me that Pinsker “now lives in south Florida, where he writes about American literature and culture on cloudy days.”

Aha! I thought. I’ve been to south Florida; I know how the other half lives. “Writes... on cloudy days,” eh? He’s one of those people who do relaxation and fun, who don’t spend weeks locked inside their tiny studio apartments with moss growing under their arms while they struggle over essays and worry about their future. What could he possibly understand about us young literary pishers?

As it turns out, quite a bit. Sure, he might trip over analogies like Gessen’s quip, “the Edith Wharton of text messaging,” but, to be honest, I paused in confusion over that one myself. It’s well known that Wharton was an avid letter writer, a prolific correspondent fond of substituting an ampersand for an “and,” but that’s about as far as I got. The only thing I was sure of was that Gessen was being witty—nonsensical, perhaps, but witty.

But maybe that’s the whole point, after all. As Pinsker observes, Gessen is working well within the confines of a genre long since pioneered by masters like Fitzgerald and Hemingway, whose early novels spoke for a generation that self-consciously set itself apart from that of its parents. Gessen’s novel, however, like its title, adds little more than a witty twist to the past: a clever pun here, a reference to text messaging there. With typical grace and referentiality, Gessen echoes the last lines of The Great Gatsby—“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past”—but spins them forward into the future. “We do not keep each other company,” he writes, “We do not send each other cute text messages. Or, rather, when we do these things, we do them merely to postpone the moment when we’ll push these people off, and beat forward, beat forward on our little raft, alone.” The sentiment may be timeless, but Gessen drops little markers, like textual landmines for the older folks, to let us know just how contemporary he is.

No wonder, then, that Pinsker would suggest that “nothing much has changed” in the lifestyles of young writers and intellectuals except the technology they wield. Still, I’m not convinced—and not because I think that Pinsker is selling my generation short. On the contrary, I’m more inclined to side with Edmund White, who once lamented to a friend of mine that the current generation of writers keeps their creativity safely within the confines of their laptops and out of their personal lives. This certainly seems to be the case with the young literati of Gessen’s novel, at any rate. They may get drunk, and they may cheat on their girlfriends every chance they get, but these mopey young guys are but a pale carbon copy of the gloriously debauched youth one finds in novels of an older generation.

“All the Sad Young Literary Men means to bring the sad-funny news about [Gessen’s] generation to the likes of me,” Pinsker writes. And indeed, Gessen’s novel is an accurate, if sometimes disheartening, report on the generation that can, with no sense of irony, rage against the machine on their iPods and buy Fair Trade coffee from chain cafés. The news isn’t all bad, however. Gessen’s earnest young literati may lack the fire and creativity of their role models, the New York intellectuals, but perhaps they are harbingers of a new kind of Jewish liberal, a new kind of New Yorker. The sad young literary men of Gessen and my generation are already blogging themselves into the fray.