Sam, Mark and Keith, the three central characters in the new novel "All the Sad Young Literary Men," are a little too familiar. They are you and me: bright, driven and committed to big, intellectual dreams. They are convinced that with enough patience and dedication they'll find someplace in this world that will let them realize their great intellectual vision.
Jumping from their (many) college years to adulthood, author Keith Gessen interweaves the lives of these three intellectuals and friends. The characters must come to reconcile their vision with reality, as they come to realize with growing maturity that no number of Google hits, women or theses will save them from loneliness and age. This book is resonant among a learned college audience, to say the least. Reading it feels like watching someone else live the life you'd planned for yourself, except a little bit grayer, a little bit emptier. Written with a gentle hand of satire, however, the novel is often just plain funny.
Gessen's book is compelling and beautiful aside from being relatable. Using their intellectual and relationship struggles, he brings the main male characters to vivid life. Their search for understanding and resonance drives the plot: These are characters the reader understands and believes in.
Amid the characters' adventures with academia and the real world, Gessen pieces together their life narratives with quiet moments of clarity. These little understandings are what make reading this book such a rich experience. You're reading along, enjoying Keith lament the women in his life, when all of a sudden a sentence just takes your breath away because of its insight and immediacy.
"I kept waiting for someone to tell me what they thought I should do, should be. What particular fate I, in particular, was fated for," Keith said. "It was the last summer that I hung out with my high school friends, and it was the last time I'd ever feel that strange, expectant, hopeful, pleading way." There are few descriptions more intelligently and concisely written about what it's like to be a motivated but directionless young adult, searching for meaning.
Gessen writes in such a way that these moments of realization feel true to the characters. They are couched with vocabulary and circumstance that gives an authenticity to their voice. For example, when Sam, a fiery intellectual who writes about Israel, argues with one of his many girlfriends on the phone, he understands his fears about the relationship in terms of what he studies.
"I mean, we're supposed to be with one person, right, we're supposed to sit at home and believe in our tiny little life with that person, we're supposed to just stay within our boundaries," he says. "But look at Israel - it's the only country on earth whose borders are unrecognized by international law, whose borders are always changing."
Further, these sparks of insight mount the irony of the character's lives: The reader is convinced that the men understand what's going on in their lives and perhaps even how to change it, but are just too wrapped up in their thoughts to piece together these realizations into a larger, more insistent whole.
Gessen's novel is refreshing for how it builds not only characters who are believable, but whose dreams are too. For anyone who spends too much time with cerebral men, or maybe is one himself, reading this book is like holding your own life up to the light.
"All the Sad Young Literary Men" by Keith Gessen will be on sale in paperback March 31.
You can reach this staff writer at agoldstein@theeagleonline.com.
