Ellen Garrison on ‘All the Sad Young Literary Men’

Posted on Jul 10, 2008

By Ellen Garrison

What might one hope for from a novel entitled “All the Sad Young Literary Men”? Not modesty, for certain, and not subtlety. The title is a nod to that saddest and most literary of young men, F. Scott Fitzgerald (“All the Sad Young Men” was a story collection that followed up “The Great Gatsby”), which should give you some idea of the book’s opinion of itself. Perhaps it is unfair to hold Keith Gessen’s literary debut to such exalted standards, or to expect it to overwhelm any flaws with the sheer power of great writing. But given the pedigree of the author—Gessen is co-founder of the literary magazine N+1 and a translator of Russian literature—one could reasonably expect this to be a novel that, like a shortish, bespectacled guy hanging around the bar at an N+1 fundraising party, might at least be funny.

But the novel is not funny, and it is not brave. (Nor, strictly speaking, is it a novel—it’s a collection of loosely linked short stories.) Bravery might seem like an inappropriate, even anachronistic demand to make of Mark, Keith and Sam, the young men who flounder through these pages in search of themselves. They are Ivy League seekers, sons of immigrants and revolutionaries who braved everything to ensure that their boys need not. But it takes a lot of courage to write a good satire—to see it through and resist the temptation to be likable—and bravery is required of any seeker, to leave the comfort of the superego and face the world head-on. Gessen’s morose and flaccid young men, however, are content to analyze their own failings with all the earnest scrutiny of college sophomores in a writing seminar (albeit a Harvard writing seminar), grasping at their straw women in desperation.

 

In each of these 10 stories the young man in question attempts to unravel his complicated desires with the help of his favorite historical or political obsession (Keith finds the electoral politics of fin-de-millennium America to be a useful prism; Mark prefers the Russian revolution, Sam the Israeli-Palestinian conflict). After 211 pages of this, Mark ruefully acknowledges that “ultimately these historical parallels were of limited use in figuring out your personal life.” But even then it doesn’t stop.

The device is mildly amusing the first time you encounter it, and for most readers that will have been in a freshman comp class when they were assigned “IND AFF, or Out of Love in Sarajevo,” by Fay Weldon. That short story, beloved by English professors everywhere, is a shining example of clean writing, sharp wit that does not spare the protagonist, and a deployment of history as metaphor that neither reduces the significance of one event (in this case, the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand) nor hilariously overstates the importance of the other (the dissolution of a tawdry affair). Unfortunately Gessen’s homage does not quite live up to Weldon’s original.

But then, “IND AFF” is narrated (and written) by a woman, and here we come to the kind of criticism most commonly dispensed with in a sentence clause. The New York Times Book Review, for example, notes that “the three men are attached to one another through slightly too faceless girls and slightly too famous universities, but. ...”  With a title like that, after all, can we really expect girls with faces? The book is not meant to be about sad young literary women. (As Gessen’s friend Emily Gould sarcastically asked in her blog, what would be the point?) Standards for such things have fallen so low that in her recent laudatory review Joyce Carol Oates is delighted to find that the women in these stories “are never presented as anything less than the equals of their male lovers and companions.” True enough—in fact they far exceed the boys in all areas pertaining to adulthood: Jillian reconsiders her English major at Harvard and proceeds to med school; Katie outgrows her fluffy sex-advice column and reveals her career ambitions in a diary left carelessly lying about; moody Celeste grows up and sticks to her meds even though they interfere with her (or more pertinently, Mark’s) sex life; Arielle, the slutty one, will not be the other woman forever. These women get things done: They call the boys on their bullshit, they don’t sit around moping and they don’t draw up elaborate historical metaphors to explain their sex lives. And though you might think on a cursory first reading that the problem with Sad Young Literary Men is that they are shallow and absurd, in fact, the problem is that their women are not. They can’t be, if Gessen’s men have any hope of finding themselves. The women are their world, and the world is against them. “She was perfectly conventional,” we’re told of one, “a lifetime of television compressed into a few perfect gestures, and nothing could have been more devastating for a man whose life was as strange and unlikely as Sam’s.” The sad devastation is necessary though: Could Sam’s life be nearly so strange and so unlikely without someone there to be conventional in comparison? These women, like the disappointing elders who pop up here and there to wound the boys with their hypocrisy, have no way of understanding what it is to be sad, or literary, or young.

New and Improved Comments

If you have trouble leaving a comment, review this help page. Still having problems? Let us know. If you find yourself moderated, take a moment to review our comment policy.