The founder of literary journal n+1, Keith Gessen emerges from the so-called American hip-lit fraternity with a cloying début novel about three self-pitying post-graduates who, struggling to balance seemingly average love lives with literary aspirations, limp towards adulthood with grating immaturity.
Mourning the collapse of his marriage with internet porn, beer and hockey, politically sensitive Mark spends much of the book snivelling about his dissertation. Self-indulgent Harvard womaniser Sam wants to write a great Zionist epic and (a morsel of humour in a novel otherwise starved of it) works himself into a frenzy over his dwindling presence on Google. Meanwhile, Keith aims for a career in liberal punditry, but is hindered by feelings of status anxiety.
For all his protagonists’ bluster, Gessen fails to evoke any empathy for them, and his unadventurous prose does little to fill this emotional void. Instead, we wince through a narrative full of trite observations, beer-goggle sentiment and facile moralising; a book that doesn’t so much wander the departure lounge of youth as litter it with cliché.
