Keith Gessen

All the sad young literary men

Gavin

Ivy League Arts boys fail at life, cut coupons, measure themselves ironically against Lenin – 

  At the same time, Mark had not been with a woman in many months. What would Lenin have done? Lenin would have called Mark’s hesitation a social-democratic scruple. It’s pretty clear what Lenin would have done.
 
- ‘Blech’, I hear you say. But it flows so smoothly that it’s hard to hold its tragic treatment of untragic subjects against it. 

It follows real life quite closely – we see [Al Gore]’s daughter at college, and a cartoon [Chomsky] –Lomaski in his office was sweaty, skinny, ill-preserved, drinking tea after tea so that his teeth seemed to yellow while Sam watched. 

There are gauche jpegs of Hegel, Lincoln, Gore inserted in the text, in an equivocal Safran Foer way. Meh. 

The women – i.e. the boys’ ideas of the women – are the fixation: they set the structure and timbre and volume of everything else. I think I am hard on it because I might have written it in a different life. Clever, but. (Extra half point for an unclichéd Palestine chapter.)

alina s

DNF - can’t believe my boy Keith wrote this garbage

Emmett

It started off as anticipation but later eroded into stone skipping. While there are some rather witty lines and original imagery, I couldn't help feeling it was altogether too many chapters of men who couldn't achieve more/fell behind in the race of living. I liked Right to Return as I was rather impressed with how Mr Gessen handled Israel and its thorny political affairs and ramifications - with all its arguments it was like a condensed version of a history essay, and all of them quite well thought out and elaborated, thus sympathy was with Sam who was stuck in this whirlpool of confusion.

Admittedly, I gave up before Part III commenced.

All the sad young literary men

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