KEY POINTS:
This is a first novel which maps a decade in the lives of three American university graduates. They all have literary ambitions and preoccupations, ranging from Zionist epic through political essay, translation of industrial manuals, pornography, to Russian history.
Sam, from Boston, is the softening athlete who can't stop talking about Israel and who chooses girlfriends on ethnic grounds. Keith, originally Kostya, is shucking off his forefathers who huddled over the Talmud. Mark meets Sasha while researching in Moscow and, at the age of 30, finds he is dramatically, disas- trously attractive to other women. Full of energy and angst, the plot ricochets amongst them against the background of an American administration sagging into disrepute.
At the start, they are all idealistic, arrogant, underfed, "worried about history and themselves". They catch fire as they read liberal laments that the country is "filled with phonies, charlatans, morons and rich people".
For 10 years, they travel to find facts or fun (Sam manages to get shot at by an Israeli tank); agonise over sex or climate change; search out the sorts of bars where you forget about death; move towards solitude or tenuous happiness, or even - awww - parenthood. So it's very much a coming-of-age, coming-of-perspective story.
Sometimes it reads like a cerebral Sex and the City, if that isn't a redundancy or an oxymoron. Characters are constantly asking themselves the great questions. Are the rich very different from you and me? Am I a good drunk? Being politically left in a distraught, yuppie way is a major motif for all three protagonists.
So is being Jewish, or too Jewish, or not Jewish enough, sometimes to the point that you forget which character you are reading about. And so are the women in their lives: the dewy acolyte, the vice-president's daughter, the one who "even in her breakdown was perfectly conventional".
All the Sad Young Literary Men is spiky with charts, graphics, literary references. The accounts of college excess will make you reminisce and wince. It's a tour de force with emotional depth and just a touch of showing off.
It's thanks to all literary muses that our own young writers are models of balance and maturity.
All The Sad Young Literary Men
By Keith Gessen (Heinemann $34.99)
* David Hill is a Taranaki writer.
