ALL THE SAD YOUNG LITERARY MEN.

Kafatou, Sarah

ALL THE SAD YOUNG LITERARY MEN by Keith Gessen

Viking Penguin, 2008, $24.95 cloth, ISBN 9780670018550

This debut novel by a recent Harvard graduate has attracted a lot of attention, and deservedly so. Its three protagonists, all young men about the age of their author, all endearingly unhappy and unsure of themselves, all with troubled and inconclusive love lives, all idealistic, all looking for meaningful work and a way into politics and history ... these fictional young men, Keith, Mark, and Sam, make us smile ruefully, make us laugh, and maybe make us cry.

They're quite alike under the skin, though their stories are different. Keith is preoccupied with American politics, the 2000 election debacle in particular, and also with several parental figures: Al Gore, the disillusioned New York intellectual Morris Binkel, and his own Russian immigrant father. Mark is preoccupied with the Mensheviks, those noble but failed revolutionaries, and also with the breakup of his marriage to Russian Sasha whom he still loves. Sam is preoccupied with Israel, the tragedy of Israel / Palestine, and also with his own importance, or rather unimportance, in the scheme of things.

Their creator, Keith Gessen, is a writer who knows very well where to place a comma and when to shift a scene. During the past decade he's made a name for himself through literary translation, book reviewing, co-editorship of the interesting new magazine n+1, and now this novel. He, not his triad of fictional alter egos, is the real young literary man, and if he's sad, it's because that's how life so often is: ridiculous and sad.

That said, his three characters succeed in coming to life on the page: a life that for each of them is a sort of groping, hopeful, yet frustrated attempt to find out who they really are and what they should do. They don't give up on this project the way the hardened, embittered Morris Binkel does, or the drifting people Keith glimpses on the street: "These people looked soft, for all their movie-star hard bodies. They looked like they were unsure of what they wanted in life but that they suspected they'd gotten it. They hoped anyway that this was it."

Each protagonist has moments of sharp wit and deep feeling. Keith is writing a paper for a Harvard course--"I had an idea about Lincoln that I'd stolen from Edmund Wilson ... and I was now trying to so muddle this idea with quotations from various French theorists that it might come to seem my own"--when AI Gore's fictional daughter Lauren walks into his room. Her visit evokes from him this very insightful passage about Al Gore: "Her eyebrows went up, momentarily. She looked great doing it--I realized her features were so generous that her mouth and brow and jaw could absorb a great deal of emotion without actually seeming to move. A few years later, during the campaign and on her father's face, it would be called 'stiffness! That's not what it was."

Mark is indecisive but he knows he has to do something or else fail forever, like the Mensheviks. Here he is, a history graduate student, at the moment when his ex-wife phones him from Canada: "'Mufka?' It was Sasha. Oh it was. And his heart filled with tears."

Sam, who's abandoned his project of writing a Zionist epic and is stuck doing back-office work at Fidelity, lives in an emotional trough where all his thoughts are of how badly he's doing in comparison with his peers. His one consolation: ''He'd gotten all the balls. It took balls to do what he did because if he failed--and he had failed--he'd end up where he was."

It's after this low point that Sam travels to the West Bank to see the conflict there for himself. Not mentioning at first that he's Jewish, he stays with Akhmed, a Palestinian teacher who wants to improve his English. "And lying there, next to Sam--healthy, handsome, and now Jewish Sam, who had come here and become more healthy, eating hummus, growing more tan, his smile whiter, and possibly even more Jewish, and would be going back, the next day or the day after that, to lie on a beach in Tel Aviv before going home to Katie and Cambridge, while Akhmed stayed here, writing English words he didn't know into a little book--Akhmed began to cry. It was very quiet but Sam could hear it. Or maybe he sensed it first, the crying, and then picked up the sounds. Oh, said Akhmed, oh oh oh. Lying next to Sam, who could do nothing but look up and wait and try not to be shaken from the bedrock conviction he'd reached just a little bit earlier in the day. Said Akhmed, crying: Why why why."

The novel comes to an open and, despite the title, rather happy end. Sam the failed novelist, perplexed about justice, goes to law school. Keith, the political journalist who cares about good leadership, is about to become a father. Mark the historian, nostalgic yet distanced from the past, has just been told firmly, by several people, "Save yourself!" We last see him poised on a decision in a bus terminal in Syracuse. Will he defend his dissertation? Will he go back to Sasha?

We wish them well.