Review by New York Times Review
LITERARY editors who write novels are like princesses who get involved in the manufacture of tiaras: they want a piece of the action, sure, but also they must want to play a more invigorating part in creating the dazzle that defines them. Some editors, like William Maxwell, are novelists no matter how they earn their living, while others, like Cyril Connolly, appear to be utterly brutalized by their own high standards. In "The Rock Pool," Connolly's 1936 novel of snobbery and ambition in the South of France, the great editor and critic wished to capture the hedonism of his artistic generation. Yet he couldn't do it. Despite all he knew about elegance and all he knew about polish, his material was ill sourced and his story as lifeless as pebbles. 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. We first meet Mark in 1998, when he comes to live in Queens with his Russian girlfriend, Sasha. I'm not sure how much fun Mark and Sasha would be to hang out with, but, lucky for us and unlucky for them, they spend most of their time with each other. They tend to argue about Israel and about Russian art - "they worried about history and themselves" and one imagines them to be the sort of potentially happy couple made joyless by a gargantuan lust for self-improvement. Mark and Sasha don't have jobs, they have "selves." So they spend most of their time in Queens getting on each other's nerves and saving money. Next up is Keith. At least, I think he's Keith. At first I thought it was Mark again, in the first person, but now I'm almost pretty sure it's Keith. He has lots of girl trouble, too, and he hungers for status and sits around at Harvard worrying about "the roundedness of his character." Yet there is a kind of intellectual propulsion behind him: "My forefathers," he says, "had been huddled over Talmuds, then Soviet literary journals, for many generations." Keith's roommate, Ferdinand, seems dedicated, in equal measure, to sleeping with women and to working out who is an idiot and who is not. Keith leaves Harvard and starts writing for some of those coveted liberal magazines. "Quickly I found some of the bitterness of my Harvard years dissipating, and the rest of it going straight into my prose." "A space of some sort had opened up in the universe," and he slips right into it, with a belief in his own "moral purity." Then there's Sam, who wants to write "the great Zionist novel." Talia, Sam's Israeli girlfriend, tells him he doesn't love the land enough to write the great Zionist novel. There are other girls - "was he a small-souled coward, not simply to have two girlfriends?" - and other causes, but basically Sam is on a not untypical journey for a sad literary young man: a journey toward never writing his great epic, even though, in Sam's case, he happily took a publisher's advance. In some senses, Sam is the least unlovable of the trio. His bad character is the more comical and his shallowness seems connected, in a deep way, to the shallowness of the surrounding culture, which at once appears to promise him the world and throttle him to death. "The living writers of the world were Sam's enemies, Sam's nemeses," Gessen writes. The best scene in the book arrives when Sam decides to call Google: "'Look,' he said. 'My Google is shrinking.' "'Excuse me?' '"My Google. I Google myself and every time it gets lower.' "'Right. Pages often go off-line and then they no longer show up on searches.' "'Yes, I understand that, but this is getting out of hand. I was in the mid-300s before. Now I'm at, like, 40,' Sam lied." When next we hook up with Mark, he has a new object of desire, Celeste, and is bumming around the campus at Syracuse trying to write a thesis on the Mensheviks but spending as much time looking up porn on the library computers. Stories of people's struggles with boredom are always boring, and the novel flags somewhat at this point. Mark takes up with Leslie, a girl he doesn't like; he goes on the StairMaster and thinks about Lenin. It might be understood to be part of the dubious charm of young men like Mark that they find their girl troubles exist on the exact same level as the worldhistorical struggles of the Russian people in March 1917, and Gessen, with a nice comic sureness, uses this sort of thing to map out a particular, educated crisis of purpose. "Mark was a selfish person," we hear, "perpetually imbibing informa-" tion, sometimes alcohol, also food, and rarely giving anything back; his sole exports were theories and sweat. On the StairMaster, especially, he produced a prodigious amount of sweat and, looking out over the roiling cauldron of undergraduate flesh, a fair number of theories. He felt bad for the kids." READERS who find the three main characters irritating will only be obeying one of the narrative's central commands, but Gessen manages several moral turnarounds, and before long the highly subjective manners of the novel begin to nurture a sense of political understanding. Sam goes to the occupied territories and works himself out, and Mark moves to Brooklyn and finds that bright young men might be loved for their loser qualities as much as anything. The three men are attached to one another through slightly too faceless girls and slightly too famous universities, but Gessen makes no drama of the correspondences and we assume a certain communion between the men only via their identical language and their similar crises. While Mark is married to the Mensheviks, and Sam gets jiggy with the Palestinians, Keith might have to content himself with being very like Keith Gessen, his Russian-born author, whose horror of clarity might be considered a national characteristic. Complications abound, and some of them are the book's fault, but Gessen's style is good-natured and ripe enough to allow a satisfying sweetness to exist in these characters as they journey around the carnival of their own selfishness. Mark and Sam and Keith may encapsulate a certain generational passion for careers over values, but their adventures here often serve laughingly to set them down among the aging troubles of the world. There must, after all, be a way of life in which literary young men are not enslaved to the sad business of always having to do better than "the people they went to college with." 'My Google is shrinking,' complains a sad young literary man who is busy not writing his novel. Andrew O'Hagan's most recent novel, "Be Near Me," has just been released in paperback.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 27, 2009]
Review by Booklist Review
In his debut novel, Gessen, founding editor of the literary magazine n+1, follows the fortunes of three college graduates struggling to find their footing both in their relationships and in their professional lives. Sam is intent on writing the great Zionist novel, but his visits to the occupied territories only serve to convince him that he is deluded about his goals and his love life. After his marriage fails, Mark humiliates himself through Internet dating and compares his struggles to those of Menshevik funny-man and Russian revolutionary Roman Sidorovich, the subject of his doctoral dissertation. Keith takes the world's problems so seriously that he spends his days worrying and thinking until his girlfriend's unplanned pregnancy jolts him out of his self-absorption. The three men are only tangentially connected through mutual acquaintances, but their shallow complaints and ineffectual actions are remarkably similar. This failure to sufficiently individualize the characters has the makings of a fatal flaw but is somewhat offset by Gessen's cutting humor. For more compelling male coming-of-age stories, steer readers to Nick Hornby or Tom Perrotta.--Wilkinson, Joanne Copyright 2008 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In n+1 founding 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.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
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 (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
