Book 2.4: All the Sad Young Literary Men

Author: Keith Gessen
Dates read: January 24, 2011 - February 23, 2011 (a depressing 31 days)
Pages: 242
Genre: Fiction

Well, I’m woefully behind schedule now (but with hope of catching up a bit since I just bought new books by two of my favorite authors, which is a subject for another time, but promising at least for the present!). I picked this book because it seemed to promise a warm self-deprecation from characters that are as nerdy about books as I am.

The book revolves around three men with intellectual pursuits and wounded hearts: Mark, a graduate student working on a thesis about the Russian Revolution and trying to get back into dating after a failed marriage early in life; Sam, a Jewish man so guilty about his inattention to his religion that he determines to write a Zionist epic but finds himself as out of his depth in the book research as he is with the strongly opinionated women in his life; and Keith, a sensitive political scholar that is as affected by personal tragedies as he is by public ones.

It’s honestly a bit difficult for me to decide whether I even liked this book. I liked the characters in it, and I was certainly highly entertained by particular passages. But there’s an awful lot in this book that’s outside of the characters or plot, mainly discussion of the history of the Russian Revolution and a lot of Israel vs. Palestine debate, and even when these topics are examined through the point of view of the characters, it still seems like these issues are discussed in needless detail. When I tried explaining the book to a friend this afternoon, the best I could come up with was this: it feels like the writer knows a lot about the issues that dominate the book, and that these issues inspired in his mind the characters that this book is ultimately about. But in building a novel around these characters, it’s as if the writer forgot to separate them out from the non-fiction elements that inspired them in the first place, resulting in a half-formed narrative that never untangled from the political and historical roots it originally sprang from. And while the non-fiction elements are interesting, ultimately they’re not why I picked up the book in the first place, nor are they why I stuck it out to the end. The men and their problems were what interested me, and I can’t help but think it would’ve been possible to write this novel about men who care about things without spending half the book expounding on those things instead of on the characters themselves.