![In the Company of Young Men.
A Contrary review by David M. Smith

The greatness of Chekhov, James Wood writes, lies in the fact that his characters forget that they are fictional creations, beholden to an author’s purposes. The opposite may be true of the three main characters of Keith Gessen's All the Sad Young Literary Men. Sam, Keith, and Mark have forgotten how to be real people; they are actors in the plays they take to be their lives, forever betting on an audience to stand them in good stead.
Take Sam, who, fresh out of Harvard, wants to write an epic novel about the founding of Israel, despite never having been to Israel and not speaking Hebrew. Sam is panicking because “His Google [is] shrinking,” that is, the number of Google hits for his name, “Samuel Mitnick,” is falling precipitously because of his inability to actually deliver his much-touted “great Zionist epic.”
To have such Google anxiety, you have to be convinced that you are actually the sort of being who could be picked out and displayed for your uniqueness. Someone with my common name, in contrast, will invariably find it difficult to be noticed by Google’s algorithms, no matter how many national epics one may have written. In the back-and-forth drama of his Google—“His poor little Google!”—Sam demonstrates one of the articles of faith common among men of his age, learning and humor: that out there somewhere must be this organizing intelligence that recognizes your exceptionality. Whatever or wherever this intelligence happens to be, you'd better have it on your side rather than against you, or—even worse—indifferent.
Reflecting the characters’ need to be known, somehow, the respective stories of Sam, Mark, and Keith are given separately in interlocking chapters and with different narrative voices. Mark, for example, is writing his dissertation at Syracuse on the Russian Revolution. A characteristic passage comes when he is deliberating whether or not to sleep with one of his colleagues: “What would Lenin have done? Lenin would have called Mark's hesitation a social-democratic scruple. It's pretty clear what Lenin would have done. And so Mark did it, too.” While the language presents itself as objective and after-the-fact, it’s not difficult to imagine Mark actually thinking these words as he peels off his clothes on the evening in question, complete with the history-making "And so Mark did it, too…". Evidently, the third-person narrative voices describing Sam and Mark know little more than Sam and Mark do, and are likely the accidental creations of their own limited consciousness.
Keith is the one character who Gessen allows to tell his own story, and his position of bewilderment and finitude is not far off from those found in the third-person sections of the book. If, in literature, the audience is granted information the character lacks, the problem with our "literary men" is their constant casting of themselves as character and audience at once. Mark, Sam and Keith are always the artificers of their own conditions of knowing and not-knowing, and Gessen's narrative achievement is to present their private oscillations between self-awareness and perplexity.
Much of the discussion around All the Sad Young Literary Men has focused upon whether the daydreams of confused, self-centered aspiring writers are consequential enough to merit delivering them up as literature. The answer is that they can be, provided a certain delicacy of authorial skill. If there does seem to be something inauthentic about such a book, that is merely because the aspirations of these young men are so inauthentic in the first place. Hence, any stories about them will inevitably run up against their own capacity for self-mythologizing (which can, of course, be manifested as the extremes of both self-aggrandizement and deprecation).
In his debut novel, Keith Gessen has not quite achieved the same cosmic level as a Chekhov, whose characters manage to elude their literary constructedness. However, his is a convincing and usually very funny portrait of three young men who are trying their damnedest to do so.
David M. Smith is a sad young literary man living in Bergen, Norway.
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© 2008 | all rights reserved
about us | xml feed | Contrary ® is a registered trademark of Contrary Magazine | donate $1 | contact us