Certo il libro è scritto veramente bene da un punto di vista stilistico. Forse troppo. Manca di spirito. I tre percorsi paralleli del libro spesso risultano noiosi nel loro non incontrarsi mai, neanche sui concetti. Certo, il romanzo è molto colto, c'è tanta ironia, ma spesso risulta un po' forzata, inseguendo lo stile di tanti autori americani. E la critica politica sottostante invecchia tantissimo il libro... ( )

http://mowgliesq.com/2010/07/09/keith-gessens-all-the-sad-young-literary-men/

Neither fish nor fowl, neither a short story collection nor a novel, Keith Gessen’s All the Sad Young Literary Men is, according to its cover, “fiction.” Mind you, that’s not the countable plural “fictions” (e.g. Borges’ Ficciones), not the indefinite article “a fiction,” but simply “fiction.” Mr. Gessen (or his editor/publisher) proves to be triply ingenious here, as it is with this appellation that he shrugs off the epiphanic duties of the shorter form, the structural incumbencies of the longer, and the ethical responsibilities of the memoir. (There is a character named “Keith” who, like Mr. Gessen, attended Harvard College and associated with the then-Vice President’s daughter.) Aside from “Lauren” (Kristin Gore) and “Keith” (Gessen is somewhat famous himself as founder of the journal n+1), other roman a clef personages include “Prof. Lomaski” (Noam Chomsky) and “Morris Binkel” (Lee Siegel). Otherwise, we are to assume that the characters are fictional, although I suspect that if you went to Harvard in the late 90s or to Syracuse University in the 2000s (as Gessen did as an MFA student) you might recognize some of your classmates in the pages of this “fiction.”

What this fiction is, more precisely, is a book of loosely interconnected stories, each featuring one of three protagonists. While “Keith” serves as a stand-in for the author, the other two, “Sam” and “Mark,” seem to be more like refractions of Gessen’s identity, the former in his Jewishness (Sam wants to write the “great Zionist epic.”) and the latter in his experience as a divorced graduate student at Syracuse (Mark is writing a history dissertation on the Mensheviks.). As long as you don’t expect these stories to have the revelatory pop and sparkle of Chekhov and Cheever (The interconnectedness of them won’t exactly blow your mind, either.), you won’t be disappointed, as there is much to be admired in Gessen’s prose. He writes with unfailing elegance, occasional lyricism and frequent humor. As a well-educated male denizen of the Boston – D.C. megapolis, I’d be lying if I said this book didn’t charm me into laughing at the quirks of my existence. It did, very much so, like when, for instance, Keith professes that “my father fervently believed [that] I-95 was so heavily trafficked, so miserable, so corrupt, especially in its Delaware portion, that one should take the long way – up to Harrisburg and then across the great state of Pennsylvania at top speed.” Or, when Mark reflects in a self-conscious moment that, “[r]ap music was the music of the lonely.” And then there’s Sam’s concern that “[h]is Google was shrinking. It was part of a larger failing, maybe, certainly, but to see it quantified . . . to see it numerically confirmed . . . it was cruel. It wasn’t nice.”

The less favorable reviews of All the Sad Young Literary Men have taken the book and its author to task for navel-gazing. The reviewers behind these screeds are either willfully missing the point or engaging in embarrassingly regressive criticism. As I see it, Gessen is chronicling a particularly solipsistic demographic through increasingly solipsistic times, and thus it is only natural that the narrative feel rather ingrown. Could he have chosen something more ennobling than these young men, with their online dating and their lewd list-making, for his subject (“Sam found similarly that no matter how much he recalculated and recalibrated, took circumstances into account and multiplied by three, there was no avoiding the fact that he hadn’t, in his life, received enough blow jobs.”)? Certainly. Should he have? Of course not. For the sake of both aesthetics and the historical record, the novelist is not obligated to always write about the extremes of human experience. While I would not presume to argue that there are too many novels about cancer or the Holocaust, I will say that there are enough of them, but not nearly enough as spot-on and risible as Mr. Gessen’s All the Sad Young Literary Men.

A provocative mix of the personal and political, through the eyes of characters on the cusp. ( )

Het boek van Keith Gessen overtuigt niet. En boeit ook niet. Verwondert niet. Streelt niet. En slaat veel te zacht om zich heen. Net zoals de personages in dit boek, lijkt het boek te blijven steken in een initieel opzet, een plan, een voornemen - dat tegen de tijd dat het uitgewerkt is, er niet meer toe doet, of toch minstens de voorbije uren (jaren) als vrij zinloos dwingt te klasseren.

http://occamsrazorlibrary.blogspot.com/2010/02/all-sad-young-literary-men.html ( )

Keith Gessen est l'auteur d'un livre sur une génération désenchantée, dans un monde qui s'applique à montrer sa relativité, un monde qui se dérobe aux convictions, et même aux relations. Une génération (incarnée par 3 protagonistes différents) qui refuse de grandir, qui n'a rien vécu d'autres que de petits déboires sentimentaux et des vanités égoistes, une génération qui est tombé dans la facilité de vivre du monde occidental. Des existences rythmées par les ruptures et les déceptions, qui finit par les renvoyer au moule duquel ils pensaient s'extraire. Puissant. ( )