FICTION: This is a literary debut that is groaning with seriousness and political engagement, writes Kevin Barry.
First of all, with regard to the somewhat off-putting title, it should be explained that Gessen is himself a notable young literary man, a founding editor of the influential Brooklyn-based journal, n+1.
This publication has loudly demanded a new seriousness and sense of political engagement for American fiction, and it is perceived as being in stony-faced opposition to the other leading journal of the day, the San Francisco-based McSweeney's, which tends towards a lightness of tone.
This is one of the traditional west-coast-versus-east-coast disputes that sometimes ruffle the dozy waters of American letters - hand-wringing New York earnestness pitted against laid-back Californian breeziness - and with such spats are young literary men's minds greatly occupied.
Now, Gessen has bravely put his creative faculties where his mouth is, and has offered us a debut fiction that is absolutely groaning with seriousness and political engagement. Not quite a novel, it is made up of three interweaving narratives, each telling the tale of a serious, politically engaged young man with literary leanings, stumbling in and around New York and its hinterland.
First books, of course, tend to the autobiographical, and one of the young men here is even named Keith, so it is not a massive leap to suggest that the author has gone with the time-worn advice and has written about what he knows.
Our three stories, briefly put: Mark, a history postgraduate occupied with comically obscure old Soviet figures, is unsatisfactorily billeted upstate, in drab Syracuse, and finds his attention distracted by internet pornography and by the erotic potential of the polestar metropolis, so close and yet so far; Sam, a would-be novelist, is set fair to write the Great Zionist Epic, except he has no Hebrew, has yet to visit Israel, and is starting to have his doubts about the whole Jewish thing; Keith, a former college athlete, is stumbling towards a career in left-leaning punditry but he cannot loosen the shackles of family or of his lost loves.
These are baffled, over-educated young men, who over-analyse just about everything, and who, in the book's early chapters at least, are only just about distinguishable from each other.
Their stories play out, in a rather forced manner, against the backdrop of American political life, from the scandalised late years of the Clinton presidency through September 11th, the Bush-Cheney junta, Iraq, and onto the present day, with the closing pages carrying a faint waft of optimism, all our young liberals apparently convinced the tide is about to turn. (They may yet get a land.) Gessen's efforts to sketch in this political landscape are none-too-deft. We get lines such as this:
"For now, the economy was moving along, the Serbs were off the hills above Sarajevo, the party of the opposition was in confusion and disarray. Ferdinand discovered Diesel jeans and, walking around with Lauren, looked better than ever."
Nifty. There is a more fundamental problem - what happens, as a reader, if you find these young sorts just a shade trying, with their coffee-house ennui, their blogs, their dating problems, their e-mail addiction, their interminable bloody jogging?
Curiously, given his journal's high-minded creed, it is when Gessen lightens up a bit that he has most success. Sam, by far the most likeable character, packs away his Great Zionist Epic and finally makes it to Israel. The way his liberal conscience see-saws on direct exposure to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is skilfully, lightly portrayed, his journey to Jenin gets some of the book's best description, and he is granted some of its best lines: "She had such control of tone, in her text messages, she was the Edith Wharton of text messaging."
In due fairness, it should also be noted that Gessen's debut reverses the usual trend for first-time efforts: it gets better as it goes along, as its people delineate. Credit also that the writer, Russian-born and Massachusetts-raised, of a Jewish background, is operating in what must be a very daunting tradition. When your literary forebears include the likes of Bellow and Roth, a pretty high bar has been set, and it's a mark of the author's ambition that he nevertheless allows such titans to be clear influences on his work. That he never achieves anything remotely like the former's free-flowing invention or the latter's inspired hysteria should not be a cause for shame.
More worrying is that quality control is not always what it should be - some clunkers of lines get through, the book is overly talky and its dialogue is sometimes lead-weight. The seriousness and political engagement distract from the stories as much as they give depth to them.
And frankly, some of us prefer our seriousness and political engagement to be confined to the op-ed pages and not poured, like a heavy sauce, all over our fiction.
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Kevin Barry's short story collection, There Are Little Kingdoms, has been awarded the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature and is available in paperback, published by Stinging Fly Press. He is preparing a stage adaptation with Meridian Theatre Company
All the Sad Young Literary Men By Keith Gessen William Heinemann, 242pp. £12.99