Keith Gessen, _A Terrible Country_

 A GIANT STEP beyond the likable but thin All the Sad Young Literary Men, I'd say. A friend said A Terrible Country is "a good novel, not a great novel." Not great, maybe, but I'd go stronger than "good"--an excellent novel, I'd say, and one bears comparison to at least one indisputably great novel, Flaubert's L'Education Sentimentale.

In Flaubert's novel, Frédéric Moreau is a young man of civilized tastes and progressive opinions living in Paris at the time of the 1848 revolution. He is in love with Mme. Arnoux, the wife of an older friend, and convinced both that he can win her and become a leading figure in the new society being born in the revolutionary tumult. By the novel's end, he has learned the hard lesson that he never had a real shot either with Mme. Arnoux or as a leader of men. He's actually a fairly typical product of his class and his time.

Gessen's Andrei Kaplan was born in Moscow and emigrated to the USA with his family when he was a child. Now in  his mid-to-late 20s, he has pursued an academic career in Slavic Studies but seems stalled-out at the crucial post-dissertation stage. His girlfriend drops him. With not much going on, he has no reason not to accept a proposal from his brother (who has returned to Moscow and is making money) that he live in Moscow for a while and look after their grandmother.

Andrei takes a while to get used to Moscow, but his Russian becomes fluent, he makes some friends he can play hockey with, he meets a group of very stimulating young intellectuals who are interested in reviving socialist ideals in post-Soviet Russia, and he even gets a girlfriend. (The middle of the novel offers a fascinating, cliché-free portrait of post-Soviet Russia, with which Gessen is well acquainted.)

Like Frédéric Moreau, Andrei has plenty of raw material for elaborate fantasies about what sort of person he is on the cusp of becoming. 

Like Frédéric, he is embarrassingly wrong. (I'll spare you the details.)

I don't know whether A Terrible Country will become a classic, but in its handling of theme of the young man  hitting the wall of his own delusions, it has a shot at enduring.