I am reading All the Sad Young Literary Men by Keith Gessen today. Yeah, yeah, I relate to the title, and some of the book. I will admit weariness to the trend of generic novel titling.

(Re: 

• Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers

• Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart 

• The Financial Lives of Poets by Jess Walter

• Anthropology of an American Girl by Hilary Hamann

• A Short History of Tractors in Ukranian by Marina Lewycka  

• Special Topics in Calumnity Physics by Marisha Pessl 

As a related and recommended title for that last one, Amazon lists The Book of Alternative Photographic Processes, which I actually had to click on to make sure it wasn’t a novel.)

Gessen’s novel is intensely readable and page turning but oddly derivative, and proud to wear its source materials on its sleeve. The first chapter echoes the awkwardness of President’s Clinton’s “Is Oral Sex Sex” dilemma, but more or less tells you that’s what it’s echoing. One chapter is an adaptation of an Isaac Babel story, but it tells you this. And by the time you start to think, “All these chapters about college remind me of the early novels of Fitzgerald,” Gessen throws in a reference to “beating back against the shore” which we all know from rereading The Great Gatsby over and over again. 

All of this adaptation is fun—I like spotting influences and names that are dropped and every other little game Gessen is playing—but it also makes me want to put down the book and pick up The Collected Stories of Isaac Babel, and The Beautiful and the Damned, and, hell, the goddam Starr Report, the official findings of the investigation into President Clinton’s affairs. 

I’m starting with the Babel. Ciao.