All The Sad Young Literary Men: Keith Gessen

All the Sad Young Literary Men is the first novel by Keith Gessen, one of the founding editors of cutting edge US literary magazine, N+1. As the title suggests, it is primarily concerned with three over-educated and literary young men who, regrettably, spend a lot of time being sad. There’s Mark, divorced, who spends too much of his dissertation time looking up porn. There’s Keith, a political journalist, who has recently broken up with his fiancée. And there’s Sam, who is attempting to write the great Zionist novel. Bumbling through their twenties, they have set high expectations for themselves. They are all trying to juggle one too many girlfriends, too much information, and email overload.

These three young men are inherently selfish but can be sometimes sweet. Perhaps their greatest fear is the success of their rivals and peers. While the initial set-up implies a longer narrative arc and more action, Gessen exposes with an insider’s comic gaze the anxiety and frustrations of a youth crowded with expectations. ‘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.’