Gessen responds to Eggers, Jonathan Safran Foer and others of their kind with this light, farcical critique of men like the founders of both groups, while pleading guilty himself to the maudlin narcissism of young, Ivy League intellectuals. Looking closely at the personal lives and private self-reproachments of Mark, Sam, Keith and the women they love, the chapters alternate among their stories.
These liberal 20-somethings fling themselves at causes and beat themselves up for not feeling, deep down, enough attachment to anything: not enough to fight for change and not enough to distract them from heartbreak.
Summed up this way, it might sound like a downer, but Gessen's dark humor comes through consistently in the many instances when his characters' attempts to fuse the lessons of their academic and romantic interests fall flat. Their analogies are absurd and hilarious failures, with some exceptions: "If meeting Celeste post-boyfriend was like arriving in Russia in March 1917, hopeful March after the tsar's abdication, the appointment of the provisional government, the short-lived democratic process, then they were well into anarchic June or even forbidding July."
At Syracuse University Mark draws out his dissertation on various obscure aspects of the Russian Revolution, sweats heavily in most scenes and gets more attention from more beautiful women than he can believe he deserves.
Sam, though he's not Jewish and has never been to Israel, undertakes to write a Zionist epic while living with his Israeli girlfriend Arielle in Manhattan. After they break up over politics (he's not radical enough for her) he takes off to try living with his uncle in the heart of occupied Palestine. For a while he succeeds in telling himself he is "bearing witness" to the fighting there, but gets bored of sitting around eating falafel all day and wishes there were more tanks going past his uncle's window.
Keith only connects to the others towards the conclusion of the novel. Standing in for the author and sharing his first name, only he gets to narrate his own chapters. He's a first-generation Russian immigrant and attends Harvard, where he lives in the shadow of a more popular roommate. Through a summer job as a mover, Keith meets a renowned Russian scholar, one of his idols. Entranced by this mentor's learned aura and by the glamour of the literary scene he glimpses at his side, Keith decides to become a writer.
Gessen does not waste words, but he interrupts himself annoyingly at times, representing the stops and starts in his characters' thought processes in a manner somewhere between the telegraphic and the free flowing. His tone is apprehensive and self-aware as he so frequently cuts himself off or adds something in. Thanks to this habit we seem to always know just what the sad young man in question is thinking. Gessen neglects descriptive language, but still brings us so close to the characters that we become equally caught up in their navel-gazing.
The book's title invites comparison to F. Scott Fitzgerald, who wrote "All The Sad Young Men," and "The Great Gatsby" exerts itself here as well. There's a wink to Nick Carraway when Keith rhapsodizes the Queensborough Bridge and its outlook on the city, and just like Carraway did, Keith joins his contemporaries for the party and then, in privileged hindsight, diagnoses its maladies, having observed them all from up close.
The similarities don't stop there: Keith is continually making the journey to and from the city, sometimes from home in Maryland and sometimes from Manhattan to Brooklyn by cab, taking in the city in a drunken blur at the end of a night on the town. His sketches of New York are impressionistic and emotional, and his observations are, of course, precisely what we'd expect from a writer's perspective.
By the end, Keith secures a contract for his first book and choses which of his two girlfriends he'll commit to. If the fact that this privileged young man shares the author's first name and background hasn't tipped you off yet, then cue the cartoon light bulb over your head.
One difference between three-dimensional and one-dimensional Keith stands out: In the novel, the character authors a diatribe against the Bush administration, rather than a work of fiction as we might expect. All throughout this novel, the few serious conversations between all these sad young liberals are either about politics or love affairs. Gessen disguises his commentary on the former in a Trojan horse of the latter, but his judgments come through clearly once we accept his offering: Keith, the character, calls his book "The Damages Done."
In Gessen's surprisingly optimistic closing scene, a young man bounds up the stairs towards his newly pregnant girlfriend, hoping he hasn't come home too late from football practice to tell her he's decided that he'll be happy to keep the baby. Isn't that just where we all are in this campaign season? By some magic, we all find ways to shut off the circuits of cynicism -- or reason -- enough to hope that things really will get better.
