For Grad, It's All Lit and Theory

Keith A. Gessen ’97 is one of the founding editors of the literary-political journal n+1 and author of the novel “All the Sad Young Literary Men.” In a recent interview with The Crimson, Gessen discussed Harvard, critical theory, and the role that literature has played in his life.

The Harvard Crimson: I’d like to start off by thinking about the somewhat strange and unsatisfying journeys your characters take to something approaching success and self-understanding. What were your post-collegiate years like?

Keith Gessen: When I first got out of school I moved to New York and basically sat in a room and wrote stories. And then for work, I was a PowerPoint specialist at Morgan Stanley, but after about a year I began to fear that I would die an obscure death and I started writing book reviews. Eventually I did an MFA, then moved to New York and resumed writing journalism and started n+1. In a way, all the stuff I did was very helpful in terms of putting myself in a position to publish the book and in terms of teaching me some things about writing. The downside is that it took me a very long time to finish the book.

THC: Do you regret taking all that time to finish?

KG: No, not really. I mean, a little bit, sure, a little bit. Part of the trouble in terms of the book—it’s sort of a young person’s book. Some of the early stories, as I was finishing it, were pretty far away from me. When they are written by a significantly younger person, it becomes very difficult to work with that material. But at the same time, having said that, I think the last third of the book, I couldn’t have written it even a year before I wrote it. I needed to find out what happened to people, in a way. I needed to see some of the stuff develop in real life.

THC: What about your time at Harvard? One of your characters, Keith, speaks of his “series of disappointments at that bitter place.”

KG: I do still think that Harvard is not a very warm place. That chapter is about experiencing Harvard as a station where you might begin to suspect what your place in the world is. And it might not be what you thought it was. You might have thought that once you got to Harvard everything was set at zero, and it turns out that’s not the case. I think Harvard was disappointing to me at the time, and I still think it’s a pretty tough place in a way that I didn’t expect, in a way that I think is pretty unique in American higher education—in its refusal to be a warmer and more nurturing kind of environment.

THC: In the book, Keith says that “there is the event, which simply happens, and the interpretation, which never ends.” You obviously suggest a measure of autobiography through the first-person narration of Keith. To what extent is this novel an interpretation of events from your past?

KG: It’s certainly a reinterpretation of a lot of what happened to me and the sort of people that I knew. The function of the first-person in a way is to make some things that are a little bit unbelievable seem more believable. When you write about yourself or things that happen to you or things that might have happened to you, it’s very interesting what you can do with it. When you turn it into fiction you can keep some of the things that actually happened and then you can make things up, because sometimes in real life things don’t reach a dramatic point and other times things happen in real life that are so unbelievable and so full of coincidence that no one would actually believe you if you put them in fiction. So you’ve got to throw those things out. Although the book is all highly autobiographical, in a sense, most of the events are invented.

THC: n+1 has been notable for its unapologetic willingness to address theory. In this book, you frequently allude to and often explicitly mention several big thinkers, from Rorty to Kierkegaard to Hegel. Could you talk a little about your decision to directly discuss theory and philosophy in the novel instead of keeping them the background and letting them inform your writing?

KG: You get more names in the beginning of the book than you do at the end of the book. When you’re younger these people are just names that you hear in class and that you slowly begin to approach and study. In a way these names are just kind of talismanic; they’re not attached necessarily to their books. And then as you get older and start reading these things you begin to appropriate the ideas; they begin to exist less for you as names than as actual ideas.

One of the things about American literature is that it’s always been slightly embarrassed by itself. It’s always been a problem that the idea of intellectual work, the idea of reading and writing in particular being real work, is still foreign to American culture. It’s always been a bit of an embarrassment compared to the active, dynamic, business-driven culture. But I don’t feel that way at all. Obviously, a lot of stuff we learned in college is not terribly useful, and yet a lot of it is incredibly interesting and helps us understand the world we’ve created, the world that also has been thrust upon us. This is my own project—to try to understand the world that we’re living in. And if that means using Weber or Foucault, that’s fine, that’s helpful.

THC: To some extent, this novel is as large as can be, addressing world political issues like Israel and Palestine, but it is also a small, intimate portrait of three young, white, Ivy-educated males. Are you at all worried about the charge of navel-gazing? How does this affect the cultural or political work that your book might perform, if at all?

KG: This happens to be the stuff that right now I can write best about and with the most insight and the most depth of any other subject in the world. This happens to be what I know. It’s possible that I’ll learn other things in the future—I hope—but this is the book that I could write right now. I think, if you’re honest, that you don’t really get to choose your subject.

THC: Your characters openly and earnestly engage with both politics and literature, much as you’ve done throughout your career. What sort of role do you see your book—or literature and art more broadly—playing in our contemporary world?

KG: Ideally, words succeed, always succeed. I think if anything right now we have a problem with literature being too happy being just literature and too happy playing by the terms that have been set by literature. If you look at it, the category of literary fiction is a recent invention. Before that you just had fiction, you just had novels. This thing called literary fiction has bred a certain kind of writing that is very writerly and well crafted. I want to get out of that genre, because that’s what it is, a genre. I want to really intersect with the world.

Speaking for myself, reading books has changed my life, several times, changed my mind about things, and changed the way I behave. You recognize your own behavior and your own thought patterns in a book, and you realize you must change your life.

—Interview conducted, condensed, and edited by Patrick R. Chesnut.

—Staff writer Patrick R. Chesnut can be reached at pchesnut@fas.harvard.edu.