All the Sad Young Literary Men - Couverture souple

“Gessen proves himself not only a capable observer but a natural novelist with a warm gun . . . [and] a nice comic sureness. . . . Gessen’s style is good-natured and ripe enough to allow a satisfying sweetness to exist in these characters.”
—Andrew O’Hagan, The New York Times Book Review (Editors’ Choice)
 
“Shrewd, funny, and oddly compassionate.”
—Entertainment Weekly
 
“Beginning with its risky yet playful title, All the Sad Young Literary Men is a rueful, undramatic, mordantly funny, and frequently poignant sequence of sketchlike stories loosely organized by chronology and place and the prevailing theme of youthful literary ideals vis-à-vis literary accomplishment. . . . Transposed to theater it would be not a conventional play in three dimensions intent upon simulating life, but an evening of linked monologues delivered with droll, deadpan humor and melancholy irony, with, perhaps from time to time, images of historic figures projected against the back of the stage. . . . The predicament of Gessen’s characters, as it is likely to be the preeminent predicament of Gessen’s generation, is the disparity between what one has learned of history and the possibilities of making use of that knowledge in one’s life.”
—Joyce Carol Oates, The New York Review of Books
 
“[Gessen’s] achingly comic command of the hopes, vanities, foibles, and quandaries of his peers has produced something better than fashionably maneuvered satire. It is irony (of a rare cosmopolitan sort) that this Russian-born writer brings to the New York scene, a pond that takes itself to be the ocean. He evokes the world’s culture along with our own.”
—Richard Eder, Los Angeles Times
 
“This interesting and agreeable first novel . . . can be good entertainment for readers, as the saying goes, of all ages . . . . A convincing portrait . . . Gessen has a deft satiric touch and a nice feel for irony.”
—Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post
 
“Gessen is . . . a wunderkind of the literary scene.”
—The Houston Chronicle
 
“Every generation has its clever young men, and Keith Gessen must be counted among his. . . . One of the pleasures of Gessen’s novel is how well he produces the speech patterns of brainy, left-wing Ivy Leaguers—their sardonic deployment of social-theoretical jargon, their riffs on technology and capitalism, their anxiety about status.”
—Judith Shulevitz, Slate.com
 
“[A] humorous and compassionate handle on the minds of anxious, overanalytical grads . . . an invigorating first novel.”
—The Cleveland Plain Dealer
 
“Gessen’s novel is studded with self-aware observations . . . [that] captures the inner lives of these expensively educated, romantically hapless men flailing in the dark.”
—Star Tribune (Minneapolis)
 
“There is something weirdly fetching about All the Sad Young Literary Men—weird because the book describes such a tiny, occasionally infuriating world, one where progressive magazines and book reviews might save the world and crossing paths with the vice president’s daughter is just a part of a Harvard education. . . . And yet there is something affecting about the impossibly great aspirations shared by Mr. Gessen’s trio.”
—The New York Sun
 
“A fiercely intelligent, darkly funny first novel.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
 
“This book violates pretty much every principle you learned in writing school; it’s about hypereducated twentysomethings who don’t seem to have jobs or fixed locations, and who primarily engage in speculation about what might have happened between them and their ex-girlfriends. . . . ASYLM bears, in other words, the ring of truth to life as I know it, and probably as it is known by anyone reading this. It also conveys a startling amount of emotional honest and (this may be the least fictiony of all) ambivalence, as well as the occasional nicely turned phrase. It’s a good book, and for once it’s suggestive of what might be possible in contemporary fiction, rather than of what we think has been done best by those who came before.”
—Dan, Goodreads.com
 
“Rarely has a book pissed me off so much while simultaneously forbidding me from putting it down.”
—Caitlin, Goodreads.com
 
“Cruelty and affection and erudition and innocence are so perfectly balanced in these stories, they almost make me wish I were young again.”
—Jonathan Franzen, author of The Corrections and Freedom
 
“Before age thirty, Gessen made his mark as a public intellectual and literary critic. But his artistic debut may dwarf those other, considerable contributions. Gessen’s fiction teases out subtle insights into travails both political and romantic, and with powerful humor. Heaven will take note.”
—Mary Karr, author of Lit and The Liar's Club
 
“Here is a funny, felt book by a writer supremely attuned to the vagaries of love and history, or at least to the wounding abstractions that often seem like the vagaries of love and history, especially to overwound young men. The distinction, I think, lies at the heart of this powerful, surprising fiction. Whether we like it or not, Keith Gessen has written an engaged and engaging debut.”
—Sam Lipsyte, author of The Ask and Home Land
 
“This is one of the best new books I’ve read in a long time, engrossing and acute, with an almost classical or Fitzgeraldian excellence to the prose. I recognize our lives in it.”
—Benjamin Kunkel, author of Indecision

His Google was shrinking. It was part of a larger failing, maybe, certainly, but to see it quantified... to see it numerically confirmed... it was cruel. It wasn’t nice. Sam considered the alternatives: he had friends with no Google at all, zero hits, and he even had friends, like Mark Grossman, whose name drew up the hits of other Mark Grossmans, the dentist Grossman and the banker Grossman and Grossmans who had completed 10-kilometer runs. But Sam wondered the afternoon was young and there was time for it whether Mark Grossman might not be better off. A man of the future, he would appear on Google yet. There, he would say when that moment came. I, too, am Grossman.

Sam: not Grossman. Sam: not even the size of Sam-of-old, Sam of last year, Sam of two weeks ago. After he’d failed to produce the great Zionist epic he’d been contracted to produce, after he’d stopped writing the occasional freelance article on the second Intifada, after he’d resumed his temp job to begin paying back the advance, there was, in the world, increasingly less Sam. [He backed away from the computer, into the dark, heavy tapestry that split his living room in two and composed of this pathetic little desk and shelf, with its mass of undigested papers, its pile of battered books a tax-deductible home office. Occasionally he photographed it, this consolation, this small triumph over the masters of his fate. His Google, too, had been a consolation once: if in those heady days, a book deal in his pocket, a girlfriend of complex cosmetic habits in his bedroom, his little AOL mailbox was momentarily silent and unmoving he simply strolled over to Google to confirm that he still existed. Did he ever! Three-hundred-some-odd pages of Samuel Mitnick on the World-Wide-Web, accessible to people everywhere, at any time. Want some Sam? Here you go. Some more? Click, click. Even absolutist states, even China had Google and there were a lot of people, he’d thought then, in China.

But not enough, apparently, or maybe they just weren’t clicking through... for here he was.] He wasn’t due at Celerity until four, it was barely one, and he needed to get out. Tomorrow night his date with Christine, author of sex advice, he should really stay and clean up, clean himself up, but this apartment was more than he could bear. And, in any case, if Christine hadn’t seen the signs by now, she’d never see them. His unreliable car; his jeans with a hole in them just above the ankle. From what? He had no idea. They would have dinner, dinner at Fae’s, the place where people saw you in the window when they walked by. He looked too shoddy to leave the house but he left the house. Out there: no Google; in here: Google; on Google: no Sam.

Or almost no Sam. Twenty-two. He was at twenty-two and plunging.

He patted his pocket for keys and moved out the door. Sam had other problems, maybe, or anyway the world did. Enter “misery” or “illness” or “plague” and what you saw was pages upon pages. Palestine. Sharon-Arafat. “Occupation.” Put things in quotes and you narrowed the search, and yet, “Instructions for making a bomb to kill a Jew,” or, “Directions to the nearest village where I can shoot Arabs” very popular searches, page after virtual page of results. Sam would never have so many hits.

Sam boarded the Red Line train at Harvard Square. Some people woke up before noon, and what did it get them? A good seat on the inbound 8:45, maybe. Maybe it got them that seat. But at 3:30 every seat was good, and there were plenty to go around. Perhaps this is why Sam worked the late shift at Celerity. It also meant less interaction with the bankers themselves, some of whom were Sam’s former classmates some of whom, in that former life, he had asked out on dates. In certain parts of the temp world his mastery of Excel still held cachet, still commanded attention; but less so, increasingly less so, in the five-year alumni report he kept buried, but constantly updated, deep inside his heart.

The Google had helped, once. His poor little Google! Was there nothing to be done?

Arriving at work five minutes late, Sam ducked into the bathroom and changed into his work clothes, a pair of khakis and his tie, hopping around on one foot while he tried to keep from stepping on the bathroom floor. The toilet with its scan-flusher kept flushing and flushing behind him as he hopped.

"Are you okay in there?" someone asked when he was almost done, causing him to trip into the door, the right side of his face momentarily keeping the rest of him from falling.

When Sam finally entered the cavernous main space of Celerity’s Creative Services, where a thousand monkeys clacked away at a thousand PowerPoint presentations, he tried to keep his head up proudly. He had once quit this place so that he could write his epic, and when he returned some of his coworkers made fun of him. They resented his ambition, and even more they resented his failure. The Creative Services department at Celerity was like a small town in an American movie from which everyone dreamt of escaping. It was the end of the line and to return, at the end of the line, to the end of the line, was not what Sam had planned for himself.