Mirror, Mirror

I heard a rumor that Keith Gessen's novel All The Sad Young Literary Men contains a pseudo-autobiographical character named "Keith" who's a liberal political blogger who graduates from Harvard and publishes a 2008 book about foreign policy. A quick glance through Google's "search inside" function seems to confirm this:

[Page 29] Everything I wrote then had a kind of glow -- from a spark that I had hoped but did not know was in me -- and it returned to me in print, or online (I had so many ideas that I started a blog at one of the liberal magazines), with an alienated majesty. [...] [Page 234] In Brooklyn I quickly finished my book about the Bush administration's foreign policy (The Damage Done, I called it -- it was an angry book) and found an agent, a fancy agent, and she took me to lunch at the Museum of Modern Art.

Sounds like a great guy. At any rate, my understanding is that the world has now entered an n + 1 backlash phase (it strikes me as odd that there can even be a backlash against a small-circulation quarterly) but I still like it.

This article available online at:

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2008/05/mirror-mirror/45030/