nanikeeva's review against another edition
1.0
awful, would give zero stars if i could - expected better from Gessen based on "a terrible country."
robinpiereads's review against another edition
1.0
I had to stop reading this. It did not live up to the numerous hyped-up book reviews. Bummer.
corrompido's review against another edition
5.0
I really enjoyed this book, Gessen's first. It definitely wasn't perfect, despite my 5 star rating, but overall I thought that it was excellent. It is a great portrayal of your 20s as an upper middle class male intellectual (note that since I more or less belong to that class this book may have resounded with me more than others, fair warning.) The writing was mostly great, with some truly standout lines.
The story itself follows 3 main characters through college and post-college lives, mostly focusing on love relationships and job insecurity. Despite being hard to follow at a few small areas (not obvious which character was which early on,) and Gessen's choice to stay away from the female character's point of view, it did a great job of telling a revealing story.
The story itself follows 3 main characters through college and post-college lives, mostly focusing on love relationships and job insecurity. Despite being hard to follow at a few small areas (not obvious which character was which early on,) and Gessen's choice to stay away from the female character's point of view, it did a great job of telling a revealing story.
thirdcoast's review against another edition
1.0
Wow - where to start? How much time do you spend on a bad review? Do you go over each fault, watching as you rip apart someone's work, or do you move on quickly and spare yourself any more wasted time?
This could be called: The Sad Literary Man Who Can't Write Believable Female Characters.
Every female character in this novel is like a cross between Pinocchio and a sex doll, something inanimate that is there for the male characters to speak and have sex with. I am aware that implies something wrong happened between Pinocchio and Geppetto and now that I think about it, that could be true; I'm okay with that implication for the sake of this description.
The main male characters are three men in their late twenties who all went to Harvard and are pretty much identical. Okay, let’s see if I can even keep it straight. One is grad student in Russian history. One is a political blogger. The other one --- (it’s like trying to name all seven dwarves) --- oh yeah, I had to look at a chapter title, the other one is writing a great Zionist epic. They (unknowingly) interchange women and are all pretty much passive, indecisive, and pretend they are victims while being shallow and shitty toward the people that love them.
If I had to assign a genre to this novel it would be Literary Fiction Lite - picture a commercial for Bud Light spouting about drinkability. This has readability, but that's about all.
Don't waste your time on this one.
This could be called: The Sad Literary Man Who Can't Write Believable Female Characters.
Every female character in this novel is like a cross between Pinocchio and a sex doll, something inanimate that is there for the male characters to speak and have sex with. I am aware that implies something wrong happened between Pinocchio and Geppetto and now that I think about it, that could be true; I'm okay with that implication for the sake of this description.
The main male characters are three men in their late twenties who all went to Harvard and are pretty much identical. Okay, let’s see if I can even keep it straight. One is grad student in Russian history. One is a political blogger. The other one --- (it’s like trying to name all seven dwarves) --- oh yeah, I had to look at a chapter title, the other one is writing a great Zionist epic. They (unknowingly) interchange women and are all pretty much passive, indecisive, and pretend they are victims while being shallow and shitty toward the people that love them.
If I had to assign a genre to this novel it would be Literary Fiction Lite - picture a commercial for Bud Light spouting about drinkability. This has readability, but that's about all.
Don't waste your time on this one.
nighthawk's review against another edition
rarely has a book pissed me off so much while simultaneously forbidding me from putting it down. finishing it today, i felt as though i was confronted fully with the limitations of irony as a political strategy for fiction writers. engaging, sure, and funny, sometimes very funny, as the book was, in the end, i just felt like there was something false in the character's attitudes towards themselves, and something false in the-something-like-redemption of the ending. i think gessen pretty accurately reflects the painful confusion of a certain breed of overeducated, privileged liberals who are tortured by their education and their privilege because of their politics-- but in this case, perhaps partially because this read to me more like a series of personal essays on gessen and his friends than a novel -- i found simple reflection deeply unsatisfying. and as many reviewers have noted, women are depicted not so much as people as political problems to be thought through, and while that is certainly more interesting than run-of-the-mill misogyny, in the end, the women here still feel like accessories to all the tragic, handsome brooding men. gross.
lucasmiller's review against another edition
2.0
There are elements throughout Gessen's first novel that continued to catch my attention and keep me reading to the very last page, but somehow things never cohered into a whole. It was disjointed, but not in an episodic, opened-ended manner. Plot points were explicitly bought to light and then never really mentioned again, strange crossovers of the three main narratives never gained any real steam. It's tone remained arch and self-deprecating, but also overwrought and graduate school-y. Maybe that was the point.