The Novel is Alive and Well
ALLEN, BROOKE
On Fiction The Novel Is Alive and Well By Brooke Allen THE INITIAL YEARS of adulthood, when the extreme self-absorption of youth confronts the depressing reality of the world’s indifference,...
...Offline, the rituals of finding a mate have become much more complex than they were 20 or 30 years ago...
...We might still recover . . . but the success we’d glimpsed, that we had smelled with our noses, in anticipation of which our hands had trembled, our throats made moaning noises, our hearts swelled, was denied us...
...After all, Mark will finish his dissertation some day, and get an electronic catalog listing...
...There, he would finally say when that moment came, I too am Grossman...
...The characters’ tender egos may overshadow their supposed political and social concerns, but those concerns have a way of forcing themselves to our attention...
...to see it numerically confirmed . . . it was cruel...
...If All the Sad Young Literary Men has a major fault, it is that Keith, Sam and Mark have few differentiating features: They lack recognizable voices...
...Rejection can be romantic as well as professional, and Gessen effectively captures the new sexual ground rules that forbid relationships with colleagues and prompt many young people to resort to the Web as a matchmaking service—even though, as Keith discovers, trying to meet girls online mostly results in meeting closeted gay men...
...As the above passage indicates, Gessen is sharp when it comes to the details of contemporary life, and the new social and professional conventions that have evolved along with the new technology...
...Too often, the reader has to go back to the table of contents to figure out who is being written about at any given moment...
...As the protagonists travel through their late 20s, with their friends “all busy becoming lawyers and getting married getting married and becoming lawyers,” each of them comes to a moment of decision that will determine what sort of a man he will be...
...Ultimately, having lost all shame, Sam calls Google and asks whether they couldn’t “shift the algorithm a little” and up his count until he gets back on his feet...
...The existential plight of sad young literary men has changed little since the days of George Gissing’s New Grub Street over a century ago, but the material and technical world they inhabit has added new channels of communication, and more ways (Google, e-mail, text messages, etc...
...As one of the three protagonists in Keith Gessen’s All the Sad Young Literary Men (Viking, 242 pp., $24.95) realizes with some discomfiture, “When you are 20 years old, and 21, and 22, and 23, and 24, what you want from people is that they tell you about you . . . you watch the world for the way it watches you...
...A menshinstvo of Mark...
...We might still make it but it would not be for many years, and we would not be so beautiful as we were, and our teeth would not be so bright—and the country, by then, would be in serious world-historical shit...
...This novel is evidence that traditional fiction is alive and healthy, and still has new surprises and beauties to communicate...
...Only a year ago he was a hot young political commentator, with a book deal in his pocket and 300 pages on the World Wide Web Now, his book having faltered he works as a lowly office temp and helplessly watches his career shrivel up...
...She wanted a final settlement, and if she did not have it she would drive him into the sea...
...He has taken on his gargantuan literary task in an effort to “disentangle the mess of confusion, misinformation, tribal emotionalism, and political opportunism that characterized the Jewish-American attitude toward Israel,” but his love life reflects that chaos, torn as he is between his self-assured Israeli girlfriend Talia and the even more uncompromising Arielle: “What a woman...
...Sam, who is attempting to write the Great Zionist Novel despite the fact that he has never visited Israel and does not know Hebrew, half-consciously organizes his erotic life on his muddled model of the Zionist state...
...for these young men to be rejected...
...In a brilliantly executed section of the book, we follow Sam on his long-delayed trip to Israel and the occupied territories and share his awkwardly shifting loyalties and sympathies, his surprise at the contrasts he finds there: It is all so different from what the news media have led him to expect...
...He proposes to his girlfriend at the very moment the TV networks call the 2000 election for Al Gore (unnamed in the text), fully believing he will “begin the equitable redistribution of the new wealth . . . fight for labor protection for the subjects of globalization, and . . . save the earth...
...You couldn’t do anything in this country anymore, thought Sam, without someone thinking you were a creep...
...But the habit does seem indicative of certain personality traits, and perhaps not very attractive ones...
...For instance Katie, an inamorata of Sam’s, is “the sort of girl who, when she replied to e-mails, spliced her responses into segments, in which she answered specific points, which were set off from the margin by little arrows...
...We watch Mark, the one-man menshinstvo, re-enact the Mensheviks’ trajectory on a personal level...
...It was part of a larger failing, maybe, certainly, but to see it quantified...
...She was reducing him to rubble, and he was letting her...
...Of another girl, Leslie, Mark observes that “she was part of the new barbarian horde that liked • cultural analyses of tiny objects, • prescription medicines, • elliptical machines...
...On Fiction The Novel Is Alive and Well By Brooke Allen THE INITIAL YEARS of adulthood, when the extreme self-absorption of youth confronts the depressing reality of the world’s indifference, are both painful and exhilarating...
...Living writers—especially big-Googled hipsters—are his nemeses...
...The problem, of course, is that the world and other people are far too busy watching and measuring themselves...
...He is furious when the phone rep laughs at him...
...Gessen is always aware of the poignancy of his alter egos’ usually self-inflicted predicaments, but he is quick to stress their ridiculous aspects as well...
...Dating...
...It wasn’t nice...
...One of the protagonists (also named Keith), for example, is an aspiring liberal journalist and recent Harvard grad...
...Yet although they may all speak in the same voice, it is a witty, likeable, charmingly self-deprecating voice that is a pleasure to attend to...
...It was land for peace—he gave up his moral land, his settlements on the territories of her conscience, allowed her the last word on everything...
...Judging from All the Sad Young Literary Men, he is correct...
...It was bigger than sex, bigger than pornography...
...In this first novel, the 33-year-old Gessen (a founder of the lively literary and political journal n+1) does a particularly fine job of catching the way the imperatives of youth interacted with the zeitgeist at the turn of the 21st century by grounding his characters’ personal crises in the politico-historical crises of the day...
...Gessen has a fine comedic touch, yet in spite of its facetiousness All the Sad Young Literary Men is basically a serious book...
...Gessen ends his novel on a note of cautious hope, reflecting the cautious hope engendered by the 2006 midterm elections—which Keith, after several years as a journalist in Russia, comes home to celebrate...
...Only a few minutes later the decision is rescinded...
...One suspects that each of the three men is simply a facet of Gessen himself, and their backgrounds seem to confirm the hunch: Gessen was born in Russia (like Keith), attended Harvard as an undergrad (like Keith) and Syracuse University as a grad student (like Mark), worked as a translator from Russian to English (like Mark) and a political journalist (like Keith and Sam...
...he himself is a spiritual Menshevik, “from menshinstvo, the minority...
...And we are drawn into Keith’s attempt to re-create the optimistic state of mind he attained so briefly, in November 2000...
...the diamond on Jillian’s finger starts to seem like a fake—and so does their engagement...
...Mark’s putting his cranky little list into Power Point format, however, reveals his own deep embeddedness in the culture he mocks...
...Maybe it is really better to be like Mark, who has never published at all and whose name “drew up the hits of other Mark Grossmans, the urologist Grossman and the banker Grossman and Grossmans who had completed 10-kilometer runs...
...their thoughts and impressions are interchangeable...
...Take Sam, who has begun to fret over a potentially alarming symptom: His Google is shrinking...
...The question of exactly what “sort of girl” that might make her is mysterious, particularly to older readers who would never in a million years attempt such fancy technical footwork...
...In interviews and in n+1, Gessen has taken issue with the modern cliché that books and reading are endangered activities...
...Dating, builder of cities...
...This, Mark knew from watching television, was the prime historical movement of his time: it was the biggest industry, the most potent narrative device...
...He feels more than academic affection for the group...
...Gessen comprehends the standards of his generation: No contradiction is perceived between messing with the mind and buffing the body (and just what is an elliptical machine anyway...
...Then there is Mark, languishing upstate in Syracuse—that Siberia of the soul—and dreaming of a glamorous loft life in Brooklyn while trying to finish his doctoral dissertation on the Mensheviks...
...an older reader might want to know), while the “cultural analyses of tiny objects” neatly sums up the concerns of today’s academic historians, at whose hands poor Mark constantly suffers...
Vol. 91 • March 2008 • No. 2
