Andrew O'Hagan
Fiction writers emerging from the world of journals often want to write about the hungers of their generation, the wants and hopes, the dreads and fussing, that might characterize a group of brainy young people struggling for success at the prime of their lives. One must assume that Keith Gessen has witnessed these struggles up close—not merely in his own backyard, but in his bathroom mirror—for he writes about them with the kind of knowledge you don't find on Wikipedia. The ambition of young literary Americans is a kind of trench warfare, and Gessen, an editor of the magazine n+1, proves himself not only a capable observer but a natural novelist with a warm gun.
—The New York Times
Jonathan Yardley
Their stories are told separately and connect only in passing ways, yet together they form a convincing portrait of bright young men with vague literary ambitions who can't quite work up the energy to pull the trigger on their futures…[Gessen] has a deft satiric touch and a nice feel for irony. He gets a little soft in the closing chapter, which mixes Keith's evolving personal life with Washington's evolving political life in 2006 and 2007, but ending novels is almost never easy, and it's a perennial problem for first novelists. It will be interesting to see whether, the second time around, Gessen pulls himself out of self and into the larger world, or whether he succumbs to the navel-gazing that too many literary American novelists find so tempting. There can be no doubt, though, that he has plenty of talent to work with.
—The Washington Post
Sam Lipsyte
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 Home Land and Venus Drive)
Mary Karr
Before age 30, 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 The Liar's Club and Cherry)
Jonathan Franzen
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 The Discomfort Zone)
Publishers Weekly
In n+1founding editor Gessen's first novel, three college graduates grapple with 20th-century history at the dawn of the 21st century while trying-with little success-to forge literary careers and satisfying relationships. Mark is working on his doctoral dissertation on Roman Sidorovich, "the funny Menshevik," but after the failure of his marriage, he's distracted by online dating and Internet porn. Sam tries to write the Great Zionist Novel, but his visits to Israel and the occupied territories are mostly to escape a one-sided romance back in Cambridge. And Keith is a liberal writer who has a difficult time separating the personal from the political. Less a novel than a series of loosely connected vignettes, the humor supposedly derives from the arch disconnect between the great historic events these three characters contemplate and the petty failures of their literary and romantic strivings. But it is difficult to differentiate-and thus to care about-the three developmentally arrested protagonists who, very late in the novel, take baby steps toward manhood. There's plenty of irony on tap and more than a few cutting lines, but the callow cast and listless narrative limit the book's potential. (Apr.)
Copyright 2007 Reed Business Information
Library Journal
In his first novel, Russian-born Gessen (founder, n+1 ) continues many of the same themes of his excellent short story "Like Vaclav," often with hilarious results. The book focuses on Sam, Mark, and Keith, young "literary men" with ambitious plans to change the world. Unfortunately, these plans are often derailed by their difficulties in dealing with young adulthood. Mark is not so diligently working on a dissertation about the Mensheviks in dreary Syracuse, NY, while reeling from a recent divorce. Sam plans to write a great Zionist novel despite never having been to Israel. And Keith, the son of Russian immigrants and the most thoughtful of the three, struggles with family issues and alienation. Though the three never meet, their lives intertwine as they arrive at their own forms of adulthood. The themes of "Like Vaclav" aren't quite as sustainable in novel form, but Gessen still manages to tackle serious political subjects while poking fun at how seriously his characters take themselves. Strongly recommended for most general fiction collections. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 12/07.]-Kevin Greczek, Hamilton, NJ
Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
A debut novel from Russian-born translator Gessen that skewers the literary and romantic ambitions of three well-educated, tightly wound young men. This black-comedy-in-stories alternates among three protagonists, Mark, Sam and Keith, who have little contact with one another but who have in common age, bafflement and hunger for literary fame. Mark is a Ph.D. student in Russian history who's dismayed again and again to find that erudition about the Mensheviks and finely honed skills of historical analogy avail him little-fine, avail him nothing-in sussing out his erotic life. They aren't much help, either, in getting his dissertation finished. Meanwhile, Sam gets a contract early in his 20s to produce a "great Zionist epic," but it quickly runs aground, and he has to pay back the advance. Soon he's reduced to temp work doing spreadsheets, and to watching his Internet presence (his identity!) tragically dwindle, an index of squandered promise. In one delightful scene, he calls Google and asks if they might "shift the algorithm a little" until he can get back on his feet. When this draws an uncomfortable laugh, Sam waxes indignant: "You couldn't do anything in this country anymore . . . without someone thinking you were a creep." Finally there is Keith, a subtle, earnest cultural critic and Russian immigrant who seems to have much in common with his author (Keith's sections are presented in the first person). Gessen strikes a marvelous balance between pitilessness and affection toward these young men, and manages the impressive feat of being simultaneously savage and tender. A fiercely intelligent, darkly funny first novel.
From the Publisher
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
Washington Post
A convincing portrait of bright young men with vague literary ambitions who can't quite work up the energy to pull the trigger on their futures…[Gessen] extracts a full measure of fun from the proclivity of these smart young guys to intellectualize everything to death…[He] has a deft satiric touch and a nice feel for irony.”
New York Times
The ambition of young literary Americans is a kind of trench warfare, and Gessen, an editor of the magazine n+1, proves himself not only a capable observer but a natural novelist with a warm gun.”
AudioFile
Scott Brick captures the vocal personas of the main characters while also delivering a solid narration that emphasizes moments of significance and irony.”
Barnes & Noble Review
What's so absurdly fascinating and scruffily endearing about Gessen's debut is how it makes white-male privilege read like identity fiction.”
OCT/NOV 08 - AudioFile
Gessen ties together three tangentially related stories of young men aspiring to write and leave an impact on their times in response to the political events of the recent decade, but none of them can get their act together long enough to actually produce something of meaning. Instead, they wallow in self-pity, self-aggrandizement, and self-mockery, destroying their abilities, connections, and opportunities. Scott Brick captures the vocal personas of the main characters while also delivering a solid narration that emphasizes moments of significance and irony. He maintains strong secondary characters throughout, and his pace holds listener attention through the less well-differentiated parts. L.E. © AudioFile 2008, Portland, Maine
