Books

In a time when guys are flooded with images – from Viagra commercials to Oprah shows – that say it's never too late to get the girl and make a difference in this world, All the Sad Young Literary Men offers smart and socially astute characters who feel, as they reach 30, that it's too late to find a woman or a politics to embrace.

These men have lost the chance to date with impunity or work out in public without feeling like creeps. Sam, who nervously checks his disappearing Internet presence, has abandoned his great Zionist novel and needs to pay back his book advance. Keith has spent a crucial part of his youth writing political blogs and feeling bummed that his rake of a roommate slept with Al Gore's daughter. Mark, a student of dialectical materialism, divorced in his mid-20s, decides how he will seize a sexual opportunity by thinking: What would Lenin do?

In his first novel, Keith Gessen, translator and founding editor of the literary journal n+1, gives readers three young, athletic, Jewish thinkers. Through an indecisiveness met with an equally stubborn hubris, they come to feel shame over their ties to current politics and contemporary academia, while serendipitously experiencing a few of the same women.

Here Keith has come to assess his life and world:

"A cabal of liars and hypocrites had stolen the White House, launched a criminal war, bankrupted our treasury, and authorized torture in our prisons. And now it was too late, as I have said – but also, you know, not too late. We had to live. And there were enough of us, I thought, if we just stuck together."

Old news, good news. Should we trust the messenger? Mr. Gessen's characters, alike as they are in their dissatisfaction and guilt, cannot stick even with themselves.

All the Sad Young Literary Men is for the converted, for that person who reads Capek paperbacks on free Sundays and Googles Orwell essays late into the night. It is a book about intellectual entitlement and real-world failure, about booze and bad relationships. It reminds me less of the Fitzgerald collection its name plays off than the movie St. Elmo's Fire. But All the Sad Young Literary Men is refreshing in its depicting of the greed for identity that pulsed in the relative prosperity of Clinton's America:

"When you are twenty years old, and twenty-one, and twenty-two, and twenty-three, and twenty-four, what you want from people is that they tell you about you."

What this book tells about Keith Gessen is that he is out to revive the novel of political commitment, and bring to the bludgeoned Left a bit of lugubrious fun.

Roberto Ontiveros has published fiction in the Threepenny Review, the Santa Monica Review and the anthology Hecho en Tejas. He lives in New Braunfels.

Keith Gessen

(Viking, $24.95)

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