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Last update - 18:00 02/07/2008 Fiction Scratching the surface of nothing By Ruth Margalit For Keith Gessen's characters, youth is a burden, but adulthood promises little in the way of fulfillment All the Sad Young Literary Men by Keith Gessen, Viking, 256 pages, $25 I really wanted to love this book. It is hard to say why I was so rooting for Keith Gessen. Maybe because this is his first novel, or maybe because he founded the excellent biannual "n+1" literary journal, which publishes fiction and essays. Perhaps it was the words of praise on the book's back cover by none other than Jonathan Franzen, whose "The Corrections" is arguably the definitive novel of American life on the brink of the 21st century. The beginning of "All the Sad Young Literary Men," like its reference to Fitzgerald, is indeed promising: "In New York, they saved." Thus, Gessen introduces Mark, the first in the novel's triptych of protagonists, and his Russian girlfriend Sasha: "They saved on orange juice, sliced bread, they saved on coffee. On movies, magazines, museum admissions (Friday nights). Train fares, subway fare, their apartment out in Queens. It was a principle of sorts, and they stuck to it... it was 1998 and they were in love." We then learn that Mark and Sasha met when he visited Russia to do research as an undergraduate. Sasha moved back to New York with him, but since she could barely afford to live in the city (it seems it is not only the men in the book who are sad and young), they both got by on very little. Still, unable to completely escape his bourgeois background, Mark cheated a little and accepted a car as a present from his father. Almost a decade later, having ended up with the wrong president and realizing he's married to the wrong woman, 30-year-old Mark finds himself in Syracuse, spending vast amounts of time browsing online porn instead of finishing his dissertation on the Mensheviks -- an unfortunate branch of Russian revolutionaries. Just as the Mensheviks were historically marginalized after the October Revolution by the Bolsheviks, the same could be said of Mark, who followed his acclaimed Russian history professor to the "f------ town" of Syracuse only to be left on the sidelines after a fortnight, when his teacher died of a heart attack. So far so good. But the reader is now introduced to Keith, and later to Sam, and, strangely, there is hardly any telling between the three of them, each of whom leads a completely independent existence in the novel. Granted, all are young Jewish-American male grad students, and all three identify so strongly with national politics that they seem excruciatingly unable to differentiate between their personal lack of direction and the political deadlock they fear their country is heading toward. In the end, the men are practically indistinguishable from each other. Fortunately, we have the table of contents to tell us through which character's eyes each chapter is being seen, yet one doesn't want to keep having to leaf back in order to know who's who, and, worse yet, we're not sure if we should even care. The only section that stands out in this respect comes when Gessen deviates from what can only be called the "lad lit" genre, and nose-dives into the turbulent waters of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: "What Sam needed to do, he realized after much thought and much agony and some introspection, was write the great Zionist novel. He needed to disentangle the mess of confusion, misinformation, tribal emotionalism, and political opportunism that characterized the Jewish-American attitude toward Israel. But first he had to check his e-mail." And so, Sam, equipped with no knowledge of Hebrew and an air of indifference and self-importance a la Mark, embarks on his project, while the reader is bombarded with a series of not-so-subtle comparisons between his personal life and the subject of his never-fulfilled epic. "Israel was too complicated; life was too complicated," he gasps, or, in a moment of tiresome self-aggrandizement, "He felt the need to expand. Into Jordan, Lebanon, the Sinai. This body, this Boston, could not hold all of him." The natural sophisticate As part of his obsession with anything Israel-related, Sam also gets involved with Talia, an Israeli woman he meets in Boston whose racist rants would make her average compatriot cringe. Were the dialogue between them more believable, this section could conceivably be intriguing. But when Sam dares to share with her his leftist views on Israel, here's how Talia snaps back: "This is what I expect to hear from Arabs. It's not what I expect to hear, not what I expected to hear from one of my own people. Because they would kill you, you understand that? They would kill you without thinking twice about it, they would dip their hands in your Jewish blood and for them it would be a great orgasmic pleasure." Sam himself is presented as naturally more sophisticated than Talia, just one of many examples of the undercurrent of condescension Gessen reveals toward his female characters. ("She was perfectly conventional," is how Sam admires another.) Torn between his belief in the biblical right of the Jewish people to the Land of Israel and his left-wing politics, Sam puts this tension to the test by visiting the West Bank, but, sadly, he ends up with no deeper insight into the situation beyond a vague, tongue-in-cheek siding with the Palestinian cause: "The Palestinians were idiots," he concludes broadly, "But the Israelis -- well, the Israelis were f-----. And when Sam saw an idiot faced with his natural enemy, the f-----, he knew whose side he was on." Some reviews have attempted deciphering who these three "young literary men" are based upon in reality, with some of the critics suggesting that the real-life "Sam" is an ex-Harvard colleague of Gessen's. Typically, this sort of endeavor is best avoided, for it reduces the literary product to a speculative game. However, comparisons between the author and the character of Keith can hardly be avoided -- as Gessen not only gives him his own name but also awards him with first-person narration. Like the author, Keith too was born in Russia, was educated at Harvard and Syracuse, and is a contributor to such high-brow political journals as Debate. But for someone who is supposed to act as the author's agent in the book, Keith does astoundingly little during the course of the novel, apart from making a trip to his hometown of Baltimore to escape from the claws of a demanding girlfriend, Arielle -- who, confusingly, the reader knows Sam too once dated. Confusing, because this bit of information is the only thread that links Sam and Keith, who remain completely unaware of each other's existence. Another sad woman Arielle and Keith later break up, of course, and he begins to date yet another sad young woman, this time Mark's 22-year-old ex-girlfriend Gwyn. But the closest we come to getting to know Gwyn, or any other woman in the novel for that matter, is through a series of rather cliched remarks ("her strong half-bare shoulders, her pure perfect skin, her chin like Ava Gardner's chin, her thick sensual lips") and hardly insightful comparisons between them ("Celeste was so funny! Gwyn was an angel"). Gessen himself lately acknowledged, in an interview with the Web site Vulture, that the female characters in the book suffer from the men's misogynistic attitudes, adding that this was how he witnessed his friends treating women in real life. This is a bold statement to make, and the marginalization of the women in the novel is naturally infuriating, but then the characters do not have to be politically correct -- as long as they are humanly convincing. And Gessen does manage to convince, occasionally, when he refrains from the small "recap" lists and tables he has a tendency to use, or from photos and illustrations, ranging from Hegel to Monica Lewinsky -- none of which illustrates anything plot-wise -- or from an excessive use of exclamation points. ("Cut out all these exclamation points," Gessen's role model Fitzgerald once declared. "An exclamation point is like laughing at your own joke.") If the women of "All the Sad Young Literary Men" suffer, the men suffer even more. Gessen succeeds in capturing the compulsion of contemporary young white educated males to over-think and to over-compensate for being precisely that -- young white educated males. "The trouble is that when you're young you don't know enough; you are constantly being lied to, in a hundred ways," Keith says, echoing the sense one gets from the novel that youth is a burden these characters would like to shed. At the same time, they do not quite manage to make the leap into the world of adulthood ("I was still drinking too much and giving up on people too quickly"), and so the characters all seem to be heading toward perpetual despair. The death of Fitzgerald's Gatsby laid bare the emptiness of the Jazz Age: One might have expected Gessen to follow suit. But he takes a different path, boldly offering an optimistic and a seemingly genuine conclusion to his liberal angst: "We had to live. And there were enough of us, I thought, if we just stuck together. We would take back the White House, and the statehouses and city halls and town councils. We'd keep the Congress." This hopeful left-wing imperative could have worked (one certainly could have sympathy for it), yet the ends remain too loosely tied, as even Gessen seems to be losing patience with his three protagonists. For all we know or care, Sam might have decided to stay in Israel and write his epic, or not. Nor do we learn if Mark ever finished his dissertation. Keith could have found his true love -- or did he? This is what happens when the characters' self-flagellation becomes the author's self-indulgence. We have been guided through the promise of these characters' university years, and their subsequent post-academic misdirection, yet still we never really learn who they are. In the end these Harvard and Syracuse graduates prove no different than the typical all-American college graduate that Fitzgerald had in mind when he said: "Scratch a Yale man with both hands and you'll be lucky to find a coast-guard. Usually you find nothing at all." Ruth Margalit is a staff writer for Haaretz.com. Haaretz Books, July 2008 Bookmark to del.icio.us   Death penalty Iran hands down death sentence to man who spied for Israel. Robot hospital The place where IDF treats droids wounded in the line of fire.

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