Members with This Book
Most Helpful Reviews
see all reviews
Liked It “Concise, poignant, and remarkably honest novel that both documents and satirizes the seriousness with which grad students, scholars, and aspiring writers pursue their interests. Despite their "seriousness," though, these young writers are all talk, all theory, no action...until the book's final...” see full review » see other reviews » |
Newest Reviews
see all reviews-
“Three men, whose loins seem to get in the way of their academic success. Cleverly written, in that their lives seem to mirror their field of study. COnfusing 1st/3rd person issues at times. ”
Luke H wrote this review 7 days ago. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No
“a debby downer.”
Brittany A wrote this review 3 weeks ago. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No
“I would have thought this book would have been made for me.”
David R wrote this review Thursday, June 4 2009. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No
“I liked many things about it but overall I give it a b-.”
luna51 wrote this review Friday, May 29 2009. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No
“I'm a little uncomfortable recommending a book full of such odious characters. The sad young literary men are a remarkably self-centered and talentless group of characters, with few if any redeeming qualities. I suppose the author's intent could be satirical, and his depictions could be quite realistic. His female characters don't even rise to the level of stick-figure: has this guy ever had a girlfriend? Maybe he's too busy editing n+1. But I will say that his writing style is engaging--crisp, entertaining prose, sometimes very evocative. Such a shame that he really doesn't have anything much to say. ”
Mark F wrote this review Saturday, July 26 2008. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No
1 of 1 members found this review helpful“This book, along with a few others on this list and in my current "to be read" queue, was a recommendation from my friend, Nate. Since Nate is as--hypercritical?--as I am, he's a pretty good barometer by which to judge whether a book is worth my time or not, and since he's mainly interested in contemporary/literary fiction, he tends to bring the more interesting and accomplished new releases to my attention when I might otherwise have missed them in the throes of being obsessed with yet another ten book series about dragons, magic, and tortured heroes who resent the burden of their leadership.
markpursell wrote this review Tuesday, June 3 2008. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No
All the Sad Young Literary Men is about...well, I'm not sure what it's about, actually, but we'll get to that in a bit. Suffice to say that it alternates between the POVs of three men - all sad, young, and literary - in and around New York City/Boston from the late '90s to the present. The lives of the three protagonists intersect in merely tangential ways in the narrative; instead, more in the vein of The Hours, it is their shared frustrations - with women, with themselves, with their ambitions - that connect them together. There's also a lot of bonus social investigation of Russian history and the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. (I know; I'm just as confused as you).
There were a lot of things I liked about this book, the chief one among them being the writing style. Gessen is a great line-by-line writer. His style is conversational and self-deprecating, and sometimes his diction and syntax bound upwards in this really cool, organic way that lays the moment wide open. There are a couple of really breathtaking paragraphs, made all the more breathtaking by the set-up, if you will, that comes before them. Even the conversations that Gessen orchestrates between his characters makes for fascinating reading; he has a gift for dialogue that is both natural to the ear but also suggestive of plot, emotion, and tone. This is the kind of dialogue we writers spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to construct. The characters - both main and supporting - are well-drawn and given increasing depth in their various vignettes, and despite how pathetic and/or self-loathing our three heroes occasionally become, I stayed interested in them throughout the book. Speaking of vignettes--a more accurate label for the different sections of the book than "chapters," I think--each of them is individually structured very well. Each of the three protagonists gets two or three vignettes, and each one follows a particular arc of that character to an ultimately satisfying conclusion.
As a whole, however, all these well-written, well-structured vignettes don't hang together very well in any kind of cohesive whole. The inter-relation of the various plot threads is kind of a mess, really. Each character's various arcs connect well to that character's other arcs, but not to other characters' arcs. For example, all of the Keith sections connect well to all the other Keith sections, but the Keith sections don't necessarily integrate with the Sam sections, or the Mark sections. I mean, they're all sad, young, and literary...but we got that from the title, right? Isn't there more to it? And why these three particular guys who barely know or mention or each other? Also, the sections are ordered kind of randomly, with no real purpose to the sequencing that I could ascertain. So as I read through the book, I mostly just felt kind of confused about what I was reading at any given time or why the information was being given to me, even though I was interested in the characters and engaged by the writing. I think, actually, that this book's amorphous structure speaks to a larger attitude in today's literary community that tends to shun storytelling architecture, and is a good example of why such an attitude is misguided: stories have to have structure and arc to succeed and satisfy. You can reinvent the structure if you wish--hello, Virginia Woolf--but even Woolf's most difficult novels hung on a particular structure. She was, I submit, perhaps our most visionary structuralist, veering off from linear narration but still building her stories as carefully and purposefully as a marble arch. And despite Gessen's gifts--I would definitely read another book by him--it feels like he was kind of trying to do what Jonathan Franzen did with the structure of The Corrections, but didn't pull it off with the same panache.
Final verdict: hat's off, Mr. Gessen, but I'd like some more structure, plz. Structure is a series of signposts for your reader's emotions. We get lost in the shuffle unless you're telling us where to look. I think I would have gotten more out of this if I had read each characters' arcs together and separate from all the other characters. If the only thing tying these three different stories together is that they're about similar guys in similar situations, I'm not sure I understand why they needed to be muddled together.”“Concise, poignant, and remarkably honest novel that both documents and satirizes the seriousness with which grad students, scholars, and aspiring writers pursue their interests. Despite their "seriousness," though, these young writers are all talk, all theory, no action...until the book's final act, when they make vastly different choices which actually force them to participate in the real world and forsake the "life of the mind," the life of absolute whininess and inactivity.
nholic wrote this review Thursday, May 15 2008. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No
The writing is tight, the voice unique and interesting, but it is the book's structure that pulled me in and that had me most involved. It feels like a collection of short stories, at first, and certainly Gessen might have initially written the book's chapters as stand-alone stories, but they connect so well together: three separate narratives, all thematically linked, each character an acquaintance (though they don't necessarily spend much time together on the page), each narrative alternating as the overall book progresses. There were moments when this structure made for a bit of confusion (i.e. when reading three different first-person POV accounts, you sometimes get facts about the characters mixed up, or forget whose account you're reading), but for the most part, Gessen's "All the Sad Young Literary Men" is a blast. Funny, tragic, affecting. Should be required reading for everyone who takes grad school too seriously, or who likes to laugh at those who do.”
displaying 1-8 of 8
