All The Sad Young Literary Men by Keith Gessen
Blurb for the back cover:
“Deals with love, women, and writing”
I’m personally not quite sure what to make of All The Sad Young Literary Men, Keith Gessen‘s first novel. ATSYLM follows three different individuals (Sam, Keith, and Mark) as they progress through their late teens into their late twenties. All three are in some way related to literature.
Sam wants to write the great Zionist epic novel and is having trouble doing so. His frustration grows to panic as the number of results Google returns when he Googles his name shrinks and he fears never amounting to anything in his life. In an attempt to try and understand his feelings on the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict. Being of Jewish decent, he feels a loss since he is not fighting along side the refugees and tanks in Jenin.
Mark, trying to find love or at the very least some sort of special connection with a woman, is writing his dissertation on the Mensheviks. He is the first character introduced in the prologue and is my favorite of the three. When the book starts he has a wonderful marriage with a girl and they seem to be the perfect couple. Later on we discover that the two had divorced and Mark is having a hard time meeting new women. The last chapter to feature him is about him dealing with the conflict of picking between two women whom he feels the same amount of affection towards. It shows the conflict he goes through in trying to weigh one versus the other and in the end he has to pick between the two. Of Mark, the one complaint I had was that he gets introduced first and I immediately become interested in him, but he doesn’t show up again until midway through the book.
Lastly, Keith who is partially based on the author and also deals with love, women, and writing. Wait a second, now that I think about it, all three protagonists tend to blend in to one and can sometimes be hard to differentiate between the three. They also make numerous references to Russian history, a subject which I am sorely lacking familiarity.
This book I think wants to be a Russian novel. It’s sad, depressing, and most of all slightly pretentious. ATSYLM covers themes ranging from the Bush administration, the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, and the daunting task of doing something, anything with your life after college.
I liked the book. It kind of dragged on at certain parts and the three main characters don’t stand out when compared to each other. But the overall theme and conflicts that they face are interesting enough for me to actually finish reading this book, granted it too longer than normal to finish.
