As founder of the proudly highbrow N+1 magazine, Keith Gessen is known in Manhattan literary circles for his anti-web gossip, anti-McSweeney's stance and lengthy essays on Iraq and Russian literature. Readers of the New York-based Gawker website, which frequently pokes fun at Geesen for being overserious, may not be hugely surprised to find that his autobiographical debut novel centres around the coming-of-age experiences of earnest men on the fringes of the city's literary world.

Chief among these are, in descending order of self-importance, Sam, who has an aching need to write the Great Zionist Novel and an obsession with his own Google rating; Mark, who has a tendency for romantic indecision, an aversion to cellphones and spends his life in libraries; and the not particularly mysteriously named Keith, who is so out of touch with his fellow young folk that he genuinely believes that college is the time “one falls behind” on keeping informed of who the latest movie stars are.

In a more playful writer's hands, All The Sad Young Literary Men might have turned out to be a buddy novel, but Sam, Mark and Keith know one another only distantly. Their link is essentially a spiritual one: they are all men at odds with the modern age, with an inclination to alienate their girlfriends by comparing their relationships to grand events in world politics.

During its opening pages All The Sad Young Literary Men comes across as a kind of miniature, wannabe upstart version of Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections, with only a hint of the humour. This is a shame, because a third of the way in, around the time that we join Mark downloading porn in his college library, Gessen starts to relax and get interested in his characters' relationships and foibles, and not just their intellects.

Gessen is very good at interpreting the differences between the way a person looks at the world at the age of 20 and the way they look at the world at 30, even if most of his 30-year-olds act like 45- year-olds. By the end, his young fogeys seem almost like an intriguing, previously unchronicled subsect of Generation X, their adventures a pleasing antithesis to the debauchery of an early Bret Easton Ellis novel.

All The Sad Young Literary Men by Keith Gessen
William Heinemann, £12.99

Times Recommends

• Superfreakonomics by Steven D Levitt and Stephen J Dubner
• The Times picks the 50 best paperbacks of 2009
• Vincent van Gogh’s letters show the soul of the artist