Jon Baskin
David Foster Wallace, who hanged himself in his home last September, wrote about authenticity, self-consciousness and the pursuit of happiness in America. It became a commonplace and then a cliché and then almost a taunt to call him the greatest writer of his generation, yet his project remained only vaguely understood when it was understood at all. With the benefit of time, it will be recognized that Wallace had less in common with Eggers and Franzen than he did with Dostoevsky and Joyce. Against what he believed to be the outmoded theoretical commitments of his predecessors and contemporaries, he labored “Pity,” said Stephen Dedalus, one of the twentieth century’s original sad young literary men, is “the feeling which arrests the mind in the presence of whatsoever is grave and constant in human sufferings and unites it with the human sufferer.” Three such sufferers are featured in Keith Gessen’s first book, All the Sad Young Literary Men. Mark is a fifth-year graduate student, divorced and stranded in Syracuse attempting to finish his dissertation on the Russian Revolution. Keith is a Harvard-educated political writer, separated from his longtime girlfriend and devastated by the outcome of the 2000 election. Sam, a fledgling Boston-based