‘Literary Men’ Lives On Ideas

Keith A. Gessen ’97 might have lived the vast majority of his life in America, but, as his book-flap biography points out, he was born in Russia. And though the fact of his birth does not make him a “Russian writer,” the utmost seriousness with which he approaches literature, very clearly on display in his debut novel, “All the Sad Young Literary Men,” does establish him as a writer in the Russian model. It is not that Gessen sees no room for levity in “Literary Men”—rest assured, there are plenty of the witticisms that make reading his literary magazine, n+1, so enjoyable—but rather that he perceives literature not as just a means of entertainment, but as a powerful social force, an attitude that has its roots in the literary criticism of the great 19th-century Russian thinker Vissarion Belinsky—and one that is both the novel’s greatest strength and its ultimate downfall.

Ostensibly, “Literary Men” is about three young men, Keith (Gessen’s fictional alter ego), Mark, and Sam—all with some literary or academic pretensions, all extremely reflective and self-obsessed—who drift through various complicated love affairs over the course of a decade or so, beginning at about 1994 and ending in early 2008. The novel alternates between the three characters’ tales, which are obliquely connected by the secondary characters who flit through all their lives. The plotlines are simple. Keith goes to Harvard, works as a moving man in his summer, becomes a political blogger, and eventually publishes a book. Mark spends most of the novel in Syracuse writing his dissertation on a minor figure of the 1917 Russian Revolution. Sam ends up visiting Israel and the occupied territories after failing in his attempt to write the Zionist epic and then getting fed up with his job as a temp at a bank.

However, the novel is burdened by a sense that nothing happens. It stagnates because the characters just aren’t truly relatable and can’t evoke sympathy. They are all narrow variations of the same solipsistic, narcissistic former athlete, taken with himself and caught up in his own musings. They constantly lose themselves in self-indulgent speculation on history and politics and never engage wholly in their emotion. There are no evident reasons, nothing rooted in the characters that spell the end of relationships; they just end. Mark dumps Celeste because he wants to be with the younger Gwyn, but there’s no change in his attitude towards Celeste. When asked what happened to Celeste, he says “nothing,” and it’s true. The reader can’t get involved in this, can’t grow attached, and so, even though there is some sort of emotional trajectory written into the story and some sort of movement in the work, it feels as if there is none. The only real action that the reader experiences is the progression of thought. And this is the realm that Gessen is truly concerned about.

“Literary Men” is a novel obsessed with ideas. Each character lives in the world of his thoughts, fanatically obsessed with a particular subject—for Keith, it is modern American politics, for Mark, the 1917 Russian Revolution, and for Sam, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. They do not just ponder these subjects abstractly, but live through them; their entire world is framed by them. For the characters, the whole world can be understood as analogous to these ideas. When Mark tries to convince Celeste, the woman he desires, to leave her boyfriend for him, his inner monologue is about the Bolsheviks: “But one thing he had learned from the Bolsheviks: history helps those who help themselves...Mark couldn’t get over what a bunch of fuckers the Bolsheviks were. They yelled ‘Fire’ in a crowded room, as Ulinksy once put it, and then took over. Well, Mark was a fucker too.”

When the Vice President (an unnamed but depicted Al Gore) loses the 2000 election, Keith retracts his marriage proposal to his then-girlfriend Jillian; he cannot conceive of marriage as a possibility in the wake of political disaster. This is the only perspective the novel presents. Though Gessen implicitly acknowledges that this perspective is flawed and at times ridiculous (as when Mark likens his sexual fumblings to the German communist Karl Liebnicht’s failed revolution), he presents no alternative. Even at the end of the novel, in 2008, the fictional Keith still thinks in political terms: his friends’ weddings are insignificant because “the Bush years were winding down disgracefully, the Iraq war was lost, the Middle East was lost, the environment was lost.” Only through the prism of ideas can the world be approached, Gessen seems to communicate. Only through ideas can man understand the world; only by rethinking the world can man exercise a modicum of power within it.

And at its core, the novel is about power, about control, about controlling one’s own life, whether through writing a novel or making lists or having babies to ensure the U.S. a liberal majority. Gessen sees all of modern society as this struggle for power. Nearly every single interaction in the book is framed as a power struggle, and it all reads so true. As Keith’s explains his run-in with a cop, “I could see him trying to think of some way to keep me under his dominion, for just another minute. But I was too old, I was too confident.” When Celeste refuses to leave her boyfriend, Mark consoles himself with the assertion that “he could wreck him.” When Sam abandons his novel and stops writing for journals and the like, his Google hit numbers shrink, prompting him to scream “They’re trying to disappear me!” Sam’s response is to begin to write lists of all the women he’s slept with—an attempt to reaffirm his dominance. Ultimately, the novel ends with Keith deciding how best to assert his power: “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. And in order to ensure a permanent left majority, Gwyn, we’d have many left-wing babies.”

The problem is that while “Literary Men” is a fascinating collection of ideas and insights, it does not satisfy as a novel. It is not that Gessen does not care for his characters or eschews the details of his fictional world (which, as the pictures of the first chapter attest, is not all that fictional), but that the characters’ thoughts are so relentlessly foregrounded that the rest of the work cowers behind them, reduced to obscurity by the intellectual blizzard. Gessen at times nails the details, as when he describes the standard Harvard lunch: “a huge bowl of green peas...a chicken parm sandwich, and...a cranberry-grapefruit mixture, which I’d patented.” But these glimpses of a fully realized literary world are all too often overshadowed by his characters’ ideational monologues.

“Literary Men” may not be great literature, but it is finely drawn social commentary. Still, Gessen might do well to pay heed to Belinsky’s advice: “Do not worry about the incarnation of ideas. If you are a poet, your works will contain them without your knowledge—they will be both moral and national if you follow your inspiration freely.” After all, however good Gessen’s ideas may be, they need to reach not just the minds, but the hearts of their audience to really make a difference.

—Staff writer Sanders I. Bernstein can be reached at sbernst@fas.harvard.edu.