It's hard to tell whether
the three protagonists of All The Sad Young Literary Men are separate
personalities, or just three installments of the same guy. If all these mad
mopes weren't so interchangeable, Keith Gessen's vacant bildungsroman might be
able to justify the way its characters continually alienate other people
(including their readers), under the guise that they really don't know
themselves.
Gessen's novel follows the
struggles of three apparently unrelated East Coast twentysomethings.
Unmotivated Mark, a poor grad student feeling stifled in Syracuse, spends his
research time lingering over Internet porn and wondering why his marriage to a
Russian émigré went sour. Restless Keith resents the confines of his home town
of Baltimore, and the fiancée he proposed to in a moment of passion when
Florida was called for Al Gore. And angry Sam is convinced that his job as a
paralegal in Boston is keeping him from writing his great Zionist epic, which
he started to prove to himself that he isn't another post-college
disappointment. (In perhaps the book's only funny scene, his fretting about his
search-engine results, or what he refers to as "my Google," leads him to call
technical services and plead with them to manipulate the results.)
Like F. Scott Fitzgerald's
wealthy Long Islanders, Mark, Keith, and Sam are careless people, but they're
hobbled by a complete absence of self-awareness that, while intermittently
funny, ends up making them look and behave like assholes. The passions that
compel them to describe themselves as "literary" pale in comparison to their
pursuit of bragging rights and women. (Often more than one at once.) It isn't
enough that they write books; they must be the literariest people who ever
picked up a volume of Proust. Yet Gessen pleads for our sympathy, since they're
too distracted by the tawdry business of life to write their masterpieces.
They wouldn't have to be
likeable if they were interesting; instead, while Gessen can turn a neat
phrase, his protagonists aren't people who tempt readers to linger in their
presence. Their pretensions override their humorous foibles, and the pity
potentially inspired by their myopia becomes irritation, particularly at the
frustratingly open ending, which manages to be simultaneously unrealistic and
predictable. If it's truly this unbearable to be sad, young, and literary, this
next great American whine isn't the cure.