The Sad Young Literary Men
N+1 and the birth of the 21st century literary intellectual scene
Every morning a stock-market report on reputations comes out in New York. It is invisible, but those who have eyes to see can read it. Did so-and-so have dinner at Jacqueline Kennedy's apartment last night? Up five points. Was so-and-so not invited by the Lowells to meet the latest visiting Russian poet? Down one-eighth. Did so-and-so's book get nominated of the National Book Award? Up two and five-eighths. Did Partisan Review neglect to ask so-and-so to participate in a symposium? Down two. - Norman Podhoretz, Making It
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It’s hard to conjure up, from 19 years later, what a big deal it was for the literary intellectual scene in America when the magazine N+1 debuted. It was Partisan Review resurrected, a new journal of intellectual high seriousness and stylistic panache led by a quartet of brilliant young editors—Keith Gessen, Mark Greif, Marco Roth, and Benjamin Kunkel—who seemed, collectively, to be sophisticated in just about every sphere of learning that such an endeavor called for. They knew Marxist and French theory, American and European intellectual history, modernist literature and contemporary American pop culture, even sports. They also knew how to write. The magazine had a mature and distinctive voice from its first pages, one that proved to be finely tuned to the cultural moment. There was, it turned out, an N+1-sized hole waiting to be filled in the vicinity of the New Yorker, Dissent, London Review of Books, The New Republic, and The New York Review of Books.
Not only did the journal fill it, I’d argue that N+1 became the seminal American literary intellectual journal of the first few decades of the 21st century, the template for a host of important small magazines to follow, including Jacobin, The Point, Current Affairs, American Affairs, and Parapraxis, among other. It was the launching pad for a number of important writers, including Gessen and Greif themselves, Wesley Yang, Elif Batuman, and (state senator) Nikil Saval, and it was the incubator of theoretical preoccupations and stylistic tendencies that permeated out to influence the broader literary intellectual culture in ways that are evident still.
I might be overstating the journal’s significance. I was 28 at the time it debuted, and I was its utterly ideal reader: Jewish, male, writerly, young, a recent MFA grad, and rather obsessed, as the editors were, with the legacy and romance of the New York Intellectuals. As critic A.O. Scott later wrote of the magazine, in the New York Times, the vibe in the office “was so thick with Lionel Trilling, Edmund Wilson, Hannah Arendt and Dwight Macdonald that Gessen later sent me an e-mail message hoping to correct the impression that all he and his colleagues ever talked about were the public intellectuals of the past.” This was manna to me, as a reader, so I'm not entirely reliable in my estimation of the journal's influence.
What’s undeniable, though, is that for a while N+1 did something well that no one had done well in a long time, and that would mostly disappear again once Gessen, Greif, Roth, and Kunkel got too busy with other pursuits to keep doing what one imagines they did at the beginning, which was sit around a table in their shabby chic office, cigarettes in hand, arguing for days and nights, in loud Jewish and Jewish-adjacent voices, about what to write in the “The Intellectual Situation,” which was the signature opening section of every issue of the journal, a multi-part essay authored by “the editors.”
They arrogated to themselves the task of anatomizing the political and literary intellectual scene, of saying who the important writers and publications were and what they had to tell us about the current political and cultural moment. Here they are, for instance, in “Designated Haters,” which was the first of the four short essays that constituted “The Intellectual Situation” in the first issue of the magazine in the summer of 2004. They are critiquing The New Republic, and in particular the cultural coverage of its storied “back pages” and its lion-maned literary editor Leon Wieseltier.
With the emergence of the ridiculous Dale Peck, the method of Wieseltier’s literary salon reached its reductio ad absurdum. Peck smeared the walls with shit, and bankrupted their authority for all time to come. So many forms of extremism turn into their opposite at the terminal stage. Thus the New Republic’s supposed brief for dry, austere, high-literary value—manifesting itself for years in a baffled rage against everything new or confusing—led to Peck’s auto-therapeutic wetness (as self-pity is the refuge of bullies) and hatred of classic modernism (which, to philistines, will always be new and confusing).
It didn’t have to be this way: if only they had allowed more positive individuality, cultivated something new, and still kept an old dignified adherence to the Great Tradition, running continuously to them (as they hoped) from the New York Intellectuals, whose ashes were in urns in the TNR vaults if they were anywhere. This was a magazine that began with Edmund Wilson! They went too far, and they flipped. Even they must be tired of themselves. If you pinned a work of art to their nose in their sleep, they would bat it away with the same gesture. The defense of standards became a new vulgarity.
As a reader, this was exciting. It was articulating, stylishly, certain tendencies in The New Republic that many of us had sensed but either not fully articulated to ourselves or articulated but only to ourselves or a few close friends. It was critically wrong-footing Wieseltier, a self-styled grand high poobah of high intellectual seriousness who maybe had never before been called a shit-smearer. And it was doing these things in the context of a what seemed to be a coherent vision of the larger American intellectual ecosystem. The second part of the section, “A Regressive Avant-Garde,” was dedicated to Dave Eggers, his McSweeney's empire, and the entire “Eggersard” project, with its over-earnest celebration of childhood and its twee graphic design (“a grouping of fourteen multi-colored booklets printed in Iceland on sealskin”). The third part, PoMo NeoCons, took on Weekly Standard, which seemed designed to “allow those from elite backgrounds to pretend to speak like the philistine middle-class.”
Names were named. Tendencies were thoroughly articulated. Tendentious charges were lobbed.
“The Intellectual Situation” brought into view, for public disputation and conversation, the stuff that writers and intellectuals talked to each other about over drinks but for the most part didn’t write about for the rest of the world. And it did this not just for gossipy purposes (though that was in the mix). The editors did it because it was actually important to describe the contours of the American intellectual scene, which was and is and is likely to remain the most influential political intellectual culture in the world. And because it provided a context within which the essays and fiction they published took on meaning beyond themselves. The journal created a scene and a conversation around it.
One didn’t have to agree with all of their characterizations to recognize that in laying them down as sharply and concretely as they did, they served to clarify the intellectual space within which we were all moving, either as writers ourselves or simply as readers who cared about what was being said and thought.
It’s been years since N+1 has had this kind of influence or ambition, but I was reminded of it, recently, when reading Jon Baskin’s essay on Sheila Heti,* which features a brief cameo from N+1 co-founder Benjamin Kunkel.
Baskin is offering up Heti as a rather noble example of the artist persisting in her vocation—believing in the autonomous value of art, refusing to subordinate her art to morals or politics—in the face of strong cultural pressures that seem to be derailing so many others. Kunkel enters the picture for Baskin as one of the notably and symptomatically derailed, having not just delivered a novel (his 2005 Indecision) that made the case for subordinating art to politics, but having followed that by subordinating his whole professional self to politics. Baskin writes:
The narrator of Indecision is Dwight B. Wilmerding, a 28-year-old pharmaceutical worker who wanders between jobs, romantic entanglements, and self-conceptions, once remarking that he feels “like a scrap of sociology blown into its designated corner of the world.” Then, in a surprise ending, Dwight cures his ambivalence and apathy — and also his romantic frustrations — by moving with a new girlfriend to Ecuador and becoming a “democratic socialist” doing public relations for oppressed workers. It is a reversal of the classic structure of the bildungsroman: whereas the artist’s development typically culminates with him learning to speak for himself, Dwight’s ends with him training his voice to serve his political commitments.
Kunkel showed how seriously he took his novel’s ending when, in subsequent years, he abandoned fiction and devoted himself to writing long essays on Marxism and political economy. His shift was indicative of a move by many of his generation’s novelists, or would-be novelists, into the genre of the political or sociological essay.
Of the original N+1 editorial crew, Kunkel's shift was the most dramatic, from hipster novelist to earnest Marxist, but they’ve all (with the possible exception of Roth) gotten noticeably more earnest and correspondingly less interested in anatomizing or trying to influence the scene through the strategic deployment of words and ideas. Gessen and Greif are professors. Roth is a critic for Tablet. Their books and essays are mostly about serious history or serious current things (Gessen writes often for The New Yorker, for instance, about his native country of Russia). Gone are their arsenal of savvy, authority-generating rhetorical maneuvers—the collective editorial voice, the ironic asides, the geometric post-war graphic design, the Strategic Capitalization.
N+1 is still around, under a new editorial regime, still publishing serious work. I haven’t read it for many years, and my instinct is to say that this is because it’s not interesting anymore. But of course I have no idea (because I haven’t read it for many years). It could be mind-blowingly good. A safer way to put it would be that it’s not nearly as influential anymore. I don’t worry that if I don’t read it I’ll be missing an essential piece of the larger puzzle. The current editors don’t have the cultural authority the original crop did, either through their own writing or through their positioning of important new voices in the context of a larger discourse. In the event that someone new and exciting does make their first big move in N+1,** I trust that I'll get the 411 about them through other channels, and that it doesn't mean much that they got their break in N+1. They were a one-off.
More relevantly, for our purposes, the zeitgeist torch seems to have passed to other magazines, most of them clear descendants of N+1. The most obvious of these heirs is Jon Baskin’s own baby, The Point, which he co-founded in 2008 with a few of his fellow PhD students at the University of Chicago. Baskin recently moved on to a job as deputy editor at Harper'‘s, where he'll presumably be doing less anatomizing of the scene that he was doing at The Point. Although if his essay on Heti is any indication, he may still do some of that work in his own writing.
Perhaps he'll write more for Liberties, where the Heti essay was published, a journal that is itself, arguably, another of the new or new-ish contenders on the scene that bears the imprint of N+1, though I imagine its founder and editor, ex-New Republic editor Leon Wieseltier, would dispute that characterization.
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*h/t Paul Franz for the link to the Baskin essay.
**The last writer to make this kind of splash in N+1, I think, was Andrea Long Chu, in 2018, with her essay “On Liking Women.” I’m pondering a future podcast episode on Chu with Blake Smith, who just wrote about her for Tablet, and an intellectual to be named later.