A Literary Critic Drops His Ax And Picks Up His Pen

AFTER a touch football game on a recent Saturday in Prospect Park, and an impromptu post-game salon on Don DeLillo, Keith Gessen warily brought up the subject of his own debut novel, “All the Sad Young Literary Men.”

Having scored three touchdowns for his victorious squad, Mr. Gessen, an author and editor, announced that this game would be his last of the season, as he was about to resume his book tour.

Some of the athletes — a literary agent, a blogger, Mr. Gessen’s roommate — already knew of this impending departure; others were surprised by the news and its implication that Mr. Gessen’s literary pursuits were actually serious.

“I didn’t even know he had this whole thing,” said Dan Lichtenberg, a bond trader who met Mr. Gessen in January. “We just played football.”

Mr. Gessen, 33, boyishly handsome and possessing the self-assurance of a writer twice his age, has never had an easy relationship with literary fame, even as he has gradually amassed it.

In confident, forceful criticism written for publications like The Nation and The New Yorker, Mr. Gessen has been unsparing in his assessments of which authors deserve their glossy reputations (Philip Roth) and which do not (Ian McEwan).

As a founding editor of n+1, the literary magazine whose vocal fan base belies its twice-yearly 7,500-copy print run, Mr. Gessen and his colleagues have assailed other publications they believe have squandered their eminence (The New Republic) or never merited it (McSweeney’s and anything else associated with the writer Dave Eggers).

And the idea of literary fame is central to “All the Sad Young Literary Men.” In rotating chapters, the book tells of three young strivers who are frustrated in ambitions great and small: they bungle sexual conquests, struggle to finish writing books and dissertations, and are buffeted by larger historical forces. Tantalized by the potential of greatness, they fear it will perpetually elude them.

“What if it was happening, in New York, not a few blocks from them,” Mr. Gessen writes, “what if they knew someone to whom it was happening, or who was making it happen — what if they were blind to it? What if it wasn’t them?”

In a way, Mr. Gessen’s novel is an extended dark joke on his literary career. At the football game, he admitted to monitoring his novel’s Amazon.com sales obsessively. And he lamented the fact that more visitors to his novel’s Amazon page chose to buy Sloane Crosley’s essay collection, “I Was Told There’d Be Cake,” than his book.

Of course, Mr. Gessen’s book is also the latest articulation of his belief, much expressed, that legitimacy and fame need not go hand in hand. Mystery Novel “If you’re going to be a writer, you have to not make a living,” he said over a recent dinner at a pizza parlor near the ascetic n+1 offices in Dumbo.

“You have to be prepared to live on $20,000, which is not impossible, even in New York.” (Mr. Gessen, who lives in Prospect Heights with two roommates, said he never earned more than $25,000 a year until he was 30.)

His comic novel has also elicited a serious — and seriously polarized — response. In The New York Review of Books, Joyce Carol Oates called it “mordantly funny, and frequently poignant,” while New York magazine, which previously published Mr. Gessen’s criticism, wrote that the novel delivers “the ecstasy of watching a much-hyped young littérateur fall flat on his face.”

THAT bitter glee may be payback for Mr. Gessen’s own acts of critical savagery. In the past, he has dispatched, with equal fervor, crowd-pleasing veterans (a Stephen King essay was “annoyingly philistine”) and highbrow newcomers (Jonathan Safran Foer’s debut novel “Everything Is Illuminated” was nothing but “a work of Jewish kitsch”).

Mr. Gessen, who emigrated from Moscow at the age of 6, has his own literary achievements to buttress his convictions. His translation of “Voices From Chernobyl,” a nonfiction account of the nuclear disaster by Svetlana Alexievich, won a 2005 National Book Critics Circle award. And since 2004, he has been editing n+1, along with his fellow Harvard alums Mark Greif and Benjamin Kunkel, and a fourth friend, Marco Roth, a graduate of Columbia.

They had invested $2,000 each to start the magazine, intending to publish the kinds of writing they said were unavailable in more established literary and political journals.

Mystery Novel “A lot of the best intellectual magazines are oriented toward the past,” Mr. Gessen said, “and we wanted to be oriented more toward the present.”

Beyond the simple red cover of its first issue, n+1 defined itself by the magazines it denounced, and all but challenged them to a duel. A front section sneered at the cultural criticism of The New Republic and The Weekly Standard. But n+1 held special contempt for Mr. Eggers and his cohort (“Eggersards”) who publish McSweeney’s, which to n+1 represented irony in the extreme (“an end-run around a class-based problem of sentimentality”), and The Believer, which pleaded for a snark-free approach to literature (“its overt criterion for inclusion is not expertise, but enthusiasm”).

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