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The Idiot: A Novel, by Elif Batuman
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"An addictive, sprawling epic; I wolfed it down.”
—Miranda July, author of The First Bad Man and It Chooses You
“Easily the funniest book I’ve read this year.”
—GQ
A portrait of the artist as a young woman. A novel about not just discovering but inventing oneself.
The year is 1995, and email is new. Selin, the daughter of Turkish immigrants, arrives for her freshman year at Harvard. She signs up for classes in subjects she has never heard of, befriends her charismatic and worldly Serbian classmate, Svetlana, and, almost by accident, begins corresponding with Ivan, an older mathematics student from Hungary. Selin may have barely spoken to Ivan, but with each email they exchange, the act of writing seems to take on new and increasingly mysterious meanings.
At the end of the school year, Ivan goes to Budapest for the summer, and Selin heads to the Hungarian countryside, to teach English in a program run by one of Ivan's friends. On the way, she spends two weeks visiting Paris with Svetlana. Selin's summer in Europe does not resonate with anything she has previously heard about the typical experiences of American college students, or indeed of any other kinds of people. For Selin, this is a journey further inside herself: a coming to grips with the ineffable and exhilarating confusion of first love, and with the growing consciousness that she is doomed to become a writer.
With superlative emotional and intellectual sensitivity, mordant wit, and pitch-perfect style, Batuman dramatizes the uncertainty of life on the cusp of adulthood. Her prose is a rare and inimitable combination of tenderness and wisdom; its logic as natural and inscrutable as that of memory itself. The Idiot is a heroic yet self-effacing reckoning with the terror and joy of becoming a person in a world that is as intoxicating as it is disquieting. Batuman's fiction is unguarded against both life's affronts and its beauty--and has at its command the complete range of thinking and feeling which they entail.
- Sales Rank: #206587 in Books
- Published on: 2018-03-13
- Released on: 2018-03-13
- Original language: English
- Dimensions: 8.25" h x .88" w x 5.50" l,
- Binding: Paperback
- 432 pages
Review
“Easily the funniest book I’ve read this year.” —GQ
“Masterly funny debut novel . . Erudite but never pretentious, The Idiot will make you crave more books by Batuman.” – Sloane Crosley, Vanity Fair
“Batuman wittily and wisely captures the tribulations of a shy, cerebral teenager struggling with love, friendship, and whether to take psycholinguistics or philosophy of language . . . Batuman’s writing is funny and deadpan, and Selin’s observations tease out many relatable human quandaries surrounding friendship, social niceties and first love. The result: a novel that may not keep readers up late turning pages feverishly, but that will quietly amuse and provoke thought.” — Huffington Post
“Batuman’s brainy novel is leavened with humor and a heroine incapable of artifice.”— People
“Batuman has won a Paris Review Terry Southern Prize for humor, and her book is consistently hilarious. If this is a sentimental education, it’s one leavened by a great deal of mordant and delightful humor. . . . At once a cutting satire of academia, a fresh take on the epistolary novel, a poignant bildungsroman, and compelling travel literature, “The Idiot’’ is also a touching and spirited portrait of the artist as a hugely appealing young woman.”— Boston Globe
“The Idiot is an impressive debut with a ridiculous amount of charm and a protagonist so relatable she’s almost impossible to forget.”— A.V. Club
“The Idiot is wonderful. Batuman, a staff writer at the New Yorker and the author of the sparkling autobiographical essay collection The Possessed (2010), has brave and original ideas about what a “novel” might mean and no qualms about flouting literary convention. She is endlessly beguiled by the possibilities and shortcomings of language . . . . It is a pleasure to watch Batuman render this process with the wit, sensitivity, and relish of someone who’s successfully emerged on the other side of it. For all of her fascination with linguistic puzzle boxes, the author tempers her protagonist’s intellectual vertigo with maturity and common sense.”— Slate
“Beautifully written first novel…Batuman, a staff writer for the New Yorker, has an extraordinarily deft touch when it comes to sketching character…The novel fairly brims with provocative ideas about language, literature and culture.” — The Associated Press
“A vibrant novel of ideas . . . Like her essays, Batuman’s bildungsroman is a succession of droll misadventures built around chance encounters, peculiar conversations and sharp-eyed observations. Both on campus and abroad, she brings the ever-fresh perspective of a perpetual stranger in a strange land. Her deceptively simple declarative sentences are underpinned by a poker-faced sense of absurdity and humor so dry it calls for olives.”— San Francisco Chronicle
“With her smart and deliciously comic 2010 debut, the essay collection “The Possessed,” Elif Batuman wrote one of the 21st century’s great love letters to reading . . . It was a tour de force intellectual comedy encasing an apologia for literary obsession . . . A different — though no less tenuous — variety of possession is explored in “The Idiot,” Batuman’s first novel . . . The book’s pleasures come not from the 400-page, low-and-slow smolder of its central relationship, which can at times feel like nothing more than two repressions circling one another; rather, it is Selin herself. Acutely self-conscious but fiercely intelligent, she consistently renders a strange, mordantly funny and precisely observed world . . . Selin’s is a consciousness one does not want to part with; by the end of the book, I felt as if I were in the presence of a strange, slightly detached, utterly brilliant friend. “I kept thinking about the uneven quality of time,” she writes, “the way it was almost always so empty, and then with no warning came a few days that felt so dense and alive and real that it seemed indisputable that that was what life was, that its real nature had finally been revealed.” Batuman articulates those little moments — of revelation and of emptiness — as well as anyone writing today. The book’s legacy seems destined to be one of observation, not character — though when the observer is this gifted, is that really any wonder?”-LA Times
“No one writes funnier or more stylishly about higher education. Nothing written about grad school is as entertaining as her 2010 collection of dispatches from Stanford's comparative-literature department, The Possessed, and her studied satire of Harvard in The Idiot is nearly its equal.”—Village Voice
“Batuman’s sardonic wit makes for a delectable unfolding of Selin’s experience of love, life and language.”—BBC.com
“Charming, hilarious and wise debut novel . . . Batuman titled the book The Idiot (after Dostoevsky’s famous novel) but it isn't an excoriation of its heroine. Instead, it's a fond reflection. Oh, you poor, silly idiot, she seems to be saying. The Idiot, a novel of innocence and experience, is infused with the generous attitude that Dag Hammarskjöld expressed in his memoir Markings, "For all that has been, Thank you. For all that is to come, Yes!"”— Dallas News
“The Idiot is half The Education of Henry Adams and half Innocents Abroad. Twain would have savored Selin's first international trip to Paris, Hungary and Turkey…Our first footsteps into adulthood are often memorable. Taking them in Selin's shoes is an entertaining, intellectual journey not to be missed."
— Shelf Awareness
“Selin is entrancing—so smart, so clueless, so funny—and Batuman’s exceptional discernment,
comedic brilliance, and soulful inquisitiveness generate a charmingly incisive and resonant tale of themessy forging of a self.”
— Booklist (starred review)
“Wonderful first novel . . . Batuman updates the grand tour travelogue just as she does the epistolary novel and the novel of ideas, in prose as deceptively light as it is ambitious. One character wonders whether it’s possible ‘to be sincere without sounding pretentious,’ and this long-awaited and engrossing novel delivers a resounding yes.”
— Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Selin is delightful company. She's smart enough to know the ways in which she is dumb, and her off-kilter relationship to the world around her is revelatory and, often, mordantly hilarious. Readers who are willing to travel with Selin at her own contemplative pace will be grateful that they did. Self-aware, cerebral, and delightful.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred)
“Not since Don Quixote has a quest for love gone so hilariously and poignantly awry. In spare, unforgettable prose, Batuman the traveller (to Harvard, to mysterious Hungary) recreates for the reader the psychic state of being a child entering language. We marvel and tremble with her at the impossibility and mysterious necessity for human connection that both makes life worthwhile and yet so often strands us all in torment. This book is a bold, unforgettable, un-put-downable read by a new master stylist. Best novel I've read in years.”
—Mary Karr, author of The Art of Memoir, Lit, and The Liars’ Club
“I’m not Turkish, I don’t have a Serbian best friend, I’m not in love with a Hungarian, I don’t go to Harvard. Or do I? For one wonderful week, I got to be this worldly and brilliant, this young and clumsy and in love. The Idiot is a hilariously mundane immersion into a world that has never before received the 19th Century Novel treatment. An addictive, sprawling epic; I wolfed it down.”
—Miranda July, author of The First Bad Man and It Chooses You
“Elif Batuman’s novel not only captures the storms and mysteries and comedies of youth but, in its wonderfully sensitive portrait of a young woman adventuring across languages and cultures, it brilliantly draws to our attention a modern politics of friendship. This is a remarkable book.”
—Joseph O’Neill, author of The Dog and Netherland
“Elif Batuman surely has one of the best senses of humour in American letters. The pleasure she takes in observing the eccentricities of each of her characters makes for a really refreshing and unique bildungsroman: one more fascinated with what’s going on around and outside the bewildered protagonist, than what’s going on inside her.”
—Sheila Heti, author of How Should a Person Be? and Ticknor
About the Author
Elif Batuman has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 2010. She is the author of The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them. The recipient of a Whiting Writers' Award, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award, and a Paris Review Terry Southern Prize for Humor, she also holds a PhD in comparative literature from Stanford University. The Idiot is her first novel. She lives in Brooklyn, NY.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Fall
I didn’t know what email was until I got to college. I had heard of email, and knew that in some sense I would “have” it. “You’ll be so fancy,” said my mother’s sister, who had married a computer scientist, “sending your e . . . mails.” She emphasized the “e” and paused before “mail.”
That summer, I heard email mentioned with increasing frequency. “Things are changing so fast,” my father said. “Today at work I surfed the World Wide Web. One second, I was in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. One second later, I was in Anıtkabir.” Anıtkabir, Atatürk’s mausoleum, was located in Ankara. I had no idea what my father was talking about, but I knew there was no meaningful sense in which he had been “in” Ankara that day, so I didn’t really pay attention.
On the first day of college, I stood in line behind a folding table and eventually received an email address and temporary password. The “address” had my last name in it—Karadağ, but all lowercase, and without the Turkish ğ, which was silent. From an early age I had understood that a silent g was funny. “The g is silent,” I would say in a weary voice, and it was always hilarious. I didn’t understand how the email address was an address, or what it was short for. “What do we do with this, hang ourselves?” I asked, holding up the Ethernet cable.
“You plug it into the wall,” said the girl behind the table.
Insofar as I’d had any idea about it at all, I had imagined that email would resemble faxing, and would involve a printer. But there was no printer. There was another world. You could access it from certain computers, which were scattered throughout the ordinary landscape, and looked no different from regular computers. Always there, unchanged, in a configuration nobody else could see, was a glowing list of messages from all the people you knew, and from people you didn’t know, all in the same letters, like the universal handwriting of thought or of the world. Some messages were formally epistolary, with “Dear” and “Sincerely”; others telegraphic, all in lowercase with missing punctuation, like they were being beamed straight from people’s brains. And each message contained the one that had come before, so your own words came back to you—all the words you threw out, they came back. It was like the story of your relations with others, the story of the intersection of your life with other lives, was constantly being recorded and updated, and you could check it at any time.
You had to wait in a lot of lines and collect a lot of printed materials, mostly instructions: how to respond to sexual harassment, report an eating disorder, register for student loans. They showed you a video about a recent college graduate who broke his leg and defaulted on his student loans, proving that the budget he drew up was no good: a good budget makes provisions for debilitating injury. The bank was a real bonanza, as far as lines and printed materials were concerned. They gave you a free dictionary. The dictionary didn’t include “ratatouille” or “Tasmanian devil.”
On the staircase approaching my room, I could hear tuneless singing and the slap of plastic slippers. My new roommate, Hannah, was standing on a chair, taping a sign that read Hannah Park’s Desk over her desk, chanting monotonously along with Blues Traveler on her Discman. When I came in, she turned in a pantomime of surprise, pitching to and fro, then jumped noisily to the floor and took off her headphones.
“Have you considered mime as a career?” I asked.
“Mime? No, my dear, I’m afraid my parents sent me to Harvard to become a surgeon, not a mime.” She blew her nose loudly. “Hey—my bank didn’t give me a dictionary!”
“It doesn’t have ‘Tasmanian devil,’ ” I said.
She took the dictionary from my hands, rifling the pages. “It has plenty of words.”
I told her she could have it. She put it on the shelf next to the dictionary she had gotten in high school, for being the valedictorian. “They look good together,” she said. I asked if her other dictionary had “Tasmanian devil.” It didn’t. “Isn’t the Tasmanian devil a cartoon character?” she asked, looking suspicious. I showed her the page in my other dictionary that had not just “Tasmanian devil,” but also “Tasmanian wolf,” with a picture of the wolf glancing, a bit sadly, over its left shoulder.
Hannah stood very close to me and stared at the page. Then she looked right and left and whispered hotly in my ear, “That music has been playing all day long.”
“What music?”
“Shhh—stand absolutely still.”
We stood absolutely still. Faint romantic strings drifted from under the door of our other roommate, Angela.
“It’s the sound track for The Last of the Mohicans,” whispered Hannah. “She’s been playing it all morning, since I got up. She’s just been sitting in there with the door shut, playing the tape over and over again. I knocked and asked her to turn it down but you can still hear it. I had to listen to my Discman to drown her out.”
“It’s not that loud,” I said.
“But it’s just weird that she sits there like that.”
Angela had gotten to our three-person, two-bedroom suite at seven the previous morning and taken the single bedroom, leaving Hannah and me to share the one with bunk beds. When I got there in the evening, I found Hannah storming around in a fury, moving furniture, sneezing, and shouting about Angela. “I never even saw her!” Hannah yelled from under her desk. She suddenly succeeded in detaching two things she had been pulling at, and banged her head. “OWW!” she yelled. She crawled out and pointed wrathfully at Angela’s desk. “These books? They’re fake!” She seized what looked like a stack of four leather-bound volumes, one with The Holy Bible printed on the spine, shook it under my nose, and slammed it down again. It was a wooden box. “What’s even in there?” She knocked on the Bible. “Her last testament?”
“Hannah, please be gentle with other people’s property,” said a soft voice, and I noticed two small Koreans, evidently Hannah’s parents, sitting in the window seat.
Angela came in. She had a sweet expression and was black, and was wearing a Harvard windbreaker and a Harvard backpack. Hannah immediately confronted her about the single room.
“Hmm, yeah,” Angela said. “It’s just I got here really early and I had so many suitcases.”
“I kind of noticed the suitcases,” said Hannah. She flung open the door to Angela’s room. A yellowed cloth and a garland of cloth roses had been draped over the one tiny window, and in the murk stood four or five human-sized suitcases.
I said maybe we could each have the single room for a third of the year, with Angela going first. Angela’s mother came in, dragging another suitcase. She stood in the doorway to Angela’s room. Her body filled the entire doorway. “It is what it is,” she said.
Hannah’s father stood up and took out a camera. “First college roommates! That’s an important relationship!” he said. He took several pictures of Hannah and me but none of Angela.
Hannah bought a refrigerator for the common room. She said I could use it if I bought something for the room, too, like a poster. I asked what kind of poster she had in mind.
“Psychedelic,” she said.
I didn’t know what a psychedelic poster was, so she showed me her psychedelic notebook. It had a fluorescent tie-dyed spiral, with purple lizards walking around the spiral and disappearing into the center.
“What if they don’t have that?” I asked.
“Then a photograph of Albert Einstein,” she said decisively, as if it were the obvious next choice.
“Albert Einstein?”
“Yeah, one of those black-and-white pictures. You know: Einstein.”
The campus bookstore turned out to have a huge selection of Albert Einstein posters. There was Einstein at a blackboard, Einstein in a car, Einstein sticking out his tongue, Einstein smoking a pipe. I didn’t totally understand why we had to have an image of Einstein on the wall. But it was better than buying my own refrigerator.
The poster I got was no better or worse than the other Einstein posters in any way that I could see, but Hannah seemed to dislike it. “Hmm,” she said. “I think it’ll look good there.” She pointed to the space over my bookshelf.
“But then you can’t see it.”
“That’s okay. It goes best there.”
From that day on, everyone who happened by our room—neighbors wanting to borrow stuff, residential computer staff, student council candidates, all kinds of people to whom my small enthusiasms should have been a source of little or no concern—went out of their way to disabuse me of my great admiration for Albert Einstein. Einstein had invented the atomic bomb, abused dogs, neglected his children. “There were many greater geniuses than Einstein,” said a guy from down the hall, who had stopped by to borrow my copy of Dostoevsky’s The Double. “Alfred Nobel hated mathematics and didn’t give the Nobel Prize to any mathematicians. There were many who were more deserving.”
“Oh.” I handed him the book. “Well, see you around.”
“Thanks,” he said, glaring at the poster. “This is the man who beats his wife, forces her to solve his mathematical problems, to do the dirty work, and he denies her credit. And you put his picture on your wall.”
“Listen, leave me out of this,” I said. “It’s not really my poster. It’s a complicated situation.”
He wasn’t listening. “Einstein in this country is synonymous with genius, while many greater geniuses aren’t famous at all. Why is this? I am asking you.”
I sighed. “Maybe it’s because he’s really the best, and even jealous mudslingers can’t hide his star quality,” I said. “Nietzsche would say that such a great genius is entitled to beat his wife.”
That shut him up. After he left, I thought about taking down the poster. I wanted to be a courageous person, uncowed by other people’s dumb opinions. But what was the dumb opinion: thinking Einstein was so great, or thinking he was the worst? In the end, I left the poster up.
Hannah snored. Everything in the room that wasn’t a solid block of wood—the windowpanes, the bed girders, the mattress springs, my rib cage—vibrated in sympathy. It did no good to wake her up or roll her over. She just started again a minute later. If she was asleep, I was by definition awake, and vice versa.
I convinced Hannah that she had obstructive sleep apnea, which was depriving her brain cells of oxygen and compromising her chances of getting into a top-ten medical school. She went to the campus health center and came back with a box of adhesive strips that were supposed to prevent snoring by sticking to your nose. A photograph on the box showed a man and a woman gazing into the distance, wearing matching plastic nose strips, a breeze ruffling the woman’s hair.
Hannah pulled her nose up from the side, and I smoothed the strip in place with my thumbs. Her face felt so small and doll-like that I felt a wave of tenderness toward her. Then she started yelling about something, and the feeling passed. The nose strips actually worked, but they gave Hannah sinus headaches, so she stopped using them.
In the long days that stretched between even longer nights, I stumbled from room to room taking placement tests. You had to sit in a basement writing essays about whether it was better to be a Renaissance person or a specialist. There was a quantitative reasoning test full of melancholy word problems—“The graph models the hypothetical mass in grams of a broiler chicken up to eighty weeks of age”—and every evening was some big meeting where you sat on the floor and learned that you were now a little fish in a big sea, and were urged to view this circumstance as an exhilarating challenge rather than a source of anxiety. I tried not to give too much weight to the thing about the fish, but after a while it started to get me down anyway. It was hard to feel cheerful when someone kept telling you you were a little fish in a big sea.
My academic adviser, Carol, had a British accent and worked at the Office of Information Technologies. Twenty years ago, in the 1970s, she had received a master’s degree from Harvard in Old Norse. I knew that the Office of Information Technologies was where you mailed your telephone bill each month. Other than that, its sphere of activity was mysterious. How was Old Norse involved? On the subject of her work, Carol said only, “I wear many hats.”
Hannah and I both caught a terrible cold. We took turns buying cold medicine and knocked it back like shots from the little plastic cup.
When it came time to choose classes, everyone said it was of utmost importance to apply to freshman seminars, because otherwise it could be years before you had a chance to work with senior faculty. I applied to three literature seminars and got called in for one interview. I reported to the top floor of a cold white building, where I shivered for twenty minutes on a leather sofa under a skylight wondering if I was in the right place. There were some strange newspapers on the coffee table. That was the first time I saw the Times Literary Supplement. I couldn’t understand anything in the Times Literary Supplement.
A door opened and the professor called me in. He extended his hand—an enormous hand on an incredibly skinny, pale wrist, further dwarfed by a gigantic overcoat.
“I don’t think I should shake your hand,” I said. “I have this cold.” Then I had a violent fit of sneezing. The professor looked startled, but recovered quickly. “Gesundheit,” he said urbanely. “I’m sorry you aren’t feeling well. These first days of college can be rough on the immune system.”
“So I’m learning,” I said.
“Well, that’s what it’s all about,” he said. “Learning! Ha, ha.”
“Ha, ha,” I said.
“Well, let’s get down to business. From your application, you seem to be very creative. I enjoyed your creative application essay. My only concern is that you realize this seminar is an academic class, not a creative class.”
“Right,” I said, nodding energetically and trying to determine whether any of the rectangles in my peripheral vision was a box of tissues. Unfortunately, they were all books. The professor was talking about the differences between creative and academic writing. I kept nodding. I was thinking about the structural equivalences between a tissue box and a book: both consisted of slips of white paper in a cardboard case; yet—and this was ironic—there was very little functional equivalence, especially if the book wasn’t yours. These were the kinds of things I thought about all the time, even though they were neither pleasant nor useful. I had no idea what you were supposed to be thinking about.
Most helpful customer reviews
64 of 67 people found the following review helpful.
She's a great writer, but I found most of this completely tedious
By Jessica Weil
2.5 Stars.
I had a really complicated relationship with this book. On the surface, it appears to have everything I enjoy in a novel—a quirky protagonist, smart insights, dry humor, a character-driven narrative—but if I'm being honest, it was completely tedious and desperate for some more extensive editing.
It's a Bildungsroman story about a Turkish-American girl named Selin who begins her freshman year at Harvard University. Selin is awkward, insecure and unprepared for this next part of her life. She meets Ivan, an older Hungarian mathematics major, in one of her classes, and they begin something of a courtship that culminates in her traveling to Hungary that summer to be near him.
It's basically a right of passage for a college-age girl to go through that phase where she falls in love with an intellectually exciting but emotionally inept jerk. And Batuman does a really good job of capturing this to the point of nearly painful nostalgic discomfort for readers like myself who have been through that: the coy back and forth, the anxiety of waiting for that next email, the inevitable disappointment just around the corner.
Selin is a linguistics major, and so language and communication play a big role in both her internal monologue and her relationship with Ivan. Ivan, and the feelings she has for him, are so obscure and perplexing to her that there's a constant sense of disconnect. Again, this is something that felt familiar to me and reminded me of my own college years.
Batuman writes in sharp, incisive prose, and there is clearly a lot of potential in her writing. But I'm not sure how to adequately convey how boring and tedious parts of this book were. We go through every single step of Selin's first year of college and the summer following it, and much of the narrative and dialogue feels completely unnecessary. I skimmed pages and pages of this book because I cared so little about what was happening. I almost bailed on it several times. And then the sky would open and I'd come across a section that I loved. It was a very uneven and frustrating reading experience.
I would have given this a solid 2 stars, but it gets an extra .5 for Batuman's obvious talent.
10 of 10 people found the following review helpful.
Wanted to love
By PJKR
Heard Elif Batuman on NPR and loved her storytelling. How she wrote the book many years ago, put it down, reflected and redirected. I wanted to love the book as much as i did her interview. The book had beautiful prose but was indulgent, slow and at times downright dull
20 of 22 people found the following review helpful.
Now It's Time to Write Real Literature
By Robert L. Bowie, a.k.a. U.R. Bowie
Book Review
Elif Batuman
The Idiot
The Idiot (Penguin Press, 423 pages) is a debut novel by a young writer who promises to do big things in the future. Apparently the title, borrowed from Dostoevsky, refers to the main character and narrator of the story, Selin Karadag (the g is silent), who is a young woman from New Jersey of Turkish background (like the author herself). Far from being an idiot, Selin—in this novel prominently featuring words and languages—is highly intelligent. At age eighteen, as she enters Harvard University, she already speaks English and Turkish fluently, has a passable knowledge of Spanish. Over the course of the book she studies, as well, Russian and Hungarian. Her quest for new words is insatiable.
Furthermore, by the end of the action she appears to have read through practically the whole canon of Western literature. Among the multitude of books she is mentioned to be reading or have read are Anna Karenina, Crime and Punishment, Madame Bovary. Late in the novel she casually picks up the monumental, and very dense Magic Mountain and goes at it in her spare time. Almost as if you could tackle Thomas Mann’s difficult text with an apple in one hand and a Scotch in the other.
This is a tale of adolescence and a kind of Bildungsroman. It features one year (age 18-19) in the life of a future writer. Early on Selin contemplates writing a short story—featuring a courtyard with “a pink hotel, Albinoni, ashes, and being unable to leave.” That same paragraph continues, “I was an American teenager, the world’s least interesting and dignified kind of person . . . . In my story, the characters would be stuck there for a long time, for a real, legitimate reason—like a sickness. The hotel would be somewhere far away, like Japan. The hotel management would be sorry that Albinoni’s Adagio was piped into the halls and lobby for such a long time, but it would be a deep-rooted technical problem and difficult to fix.”
So one thing this novel is about is writing fiction, learning to write. Selin ends up casually entering one of her stories in a campus competition and wins. The third-place winner has written the tale of “a woman who had night sweats and then found out her grandmother had been in the Holocaust.” The second-place winner told the story of “a man who woke up one morning to find that his head had been replaced by a gigantic butt . . . . Why were we all so bad at writing stories? When would we get better?” Why indeed? Ah, that is the question. The Great American Short-Story Boondoggle. More on this later.
The Idiot turns out to be a strange sort of modern-day epistolary novel, since the main plot features an e-mail exchange between Selin and a gangling and rather screwed-up Hungarian grad student, Ivan. She meets him in Russian class, but for practically the whole school year they communicate not face to face, but by e-mail. In fact, these characters are a bit ahead of their time. The action of the book is set twenty years ago, before young people began communicating through gadgets rather than face to face.
“Ivan and I had settled into a rhythm: he would take a week to write to me, and then I would force myself to wait a week before writing back. This already felt like a huge waste of time. Then eight days went by and he didn’t write, and then it was ten days, and I was sure he was never going to write me again, and I was in despair. Finally he sent a message. The subject line said crazy, which I found encouraging because that was how I felt. But when I opened the e-mail, it was only one line: My thesis is due in two weeks—I will write to you then.”
Unfortunately for the reader, Ivan, who, though a hater of words, is afflicted with the disease of logorrhea, tends to write much longer e-mails. Here is an example. “You’re right about the poet—and how right you are. Poets are liars, obsessed with cereal. They try to hammer the atom back to Fruit Loops, life back to paradise, and love back to nonexistent simplicity. You’re right—they shouldn’t do that. It isn’t possible, and they shouldn’t pretend.”
Such is the love story at the center of the plot. Nothing much happens in the book, which consists of reams of episodes strung together. Selin lives out her new life on the Harvard campus, reads, studies, volunteers to teach ESL and math, eats at the school cafeteria, goes out running, chats with her friend Svetlana—from Serbia and one of the liveliest secondary characters in a book teeming with secondary characters. At the end of the school year she goes to Hungary to teach English in Hungarian villages, mainly because Ivan is Hungarian and he will be in his native country over the summer. The plot progresses much as it has in the Harvard episodes. Selin in Hungary meets a wide variety of characters, tries to teach English, feels like a fish out of water, agonizes over her love for Ivan.
Reading The Idiot is something like being on the Tower of Babel, amidst a babble of languages from all over the world—among students mentioned at Harvard are Romanians, Bulgarians, Hungarians, Serbs, etc., etc., etc. On page 228 the reader is astonished to come upon Bill and Robin, native-born Americans. Given the people Selin associates with at Harvard, it appears that such persons are in short supply. She does have a black American roommate Angela (along with her Korean/American roommate Hannah), and a friend Ralph, but Angela is barely featured in the novel’s scenes, and Ralph is a nerd.
“Hungary felt increasingly like reading War and Peace: new characters came up every five minutes, with their unusual names and distinctive locutions.” Well yes, but Tolstoy’s characters, even secondary characters, even his dog and horse characters, are always perfectly rounded. In Elif Batuman’s novel pedestrian, undeveloped characters are the norm. A cloud of ennui hangs over the action. Here is a line that sums up much of what goes on in the book: “We spent the next two hours doing the kinds of pointless things we always did.” Luckily, the novel has a sense of humor, and that helps leaven the pointlessness. But not enough.
Mentioned once is Selin’s high school friend, Hema, whose name, read as Cyrillic, means “Ain’t got nary” in Ukrainian. Sometimes you kind of wish you could take a break from this amalgam of languages and nationalities and drop in, say, on a student at the University of Alabama named Mary Beth Jones, who has never heard of the great writers whom Selin has read, who would be baffled by almost everything Selin discusses, including the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, and who is interested, largely, in boyfriends and business administration. As for the foreign students at Harvard, the book is set in 1995-1996, and I find myself wondering where the money came from to send Serbs, Hungarians, Bulgarians, Romanians abroad to study. After all, the early nineties—with the collapse of the Soviet Empire—were economically chaotic all over Eastern Europe, but the book shows little sign of the chaos—even in the parts set in Hungary.
On and on goes the epistolary passionless “romance,” between Selin and Ivan, neither of whom have any interest in sex. Adding to the surrealistic nature of that relationship is the fact that it is modelled on the story in a Russian reader, “Nina in Siberia,” which the two are assigned in their Russian class. At one point Selin mentions that “I had the uncanny sensation that this conversation had been prefigured by the story of Nina: Nina who had pretended to study the locomotion of reindeer, and whom physics kept pushing east.”
The Ivan of the Russian reader ends up marrying someone else, which is probably what Selin’s Hungarian Ivan will end up doing as well. In class, while the two students are getting practice in spoken Russian by playing out scenes from the reader, Ivan blurts out, “I have a wife. And it’s not you.” The two main characters of The Idiot spend the whole book dancing around one another like two timid boxers, each afraid not only of fists, but even of a clinch.
By midway in the book the reader is looking for ways to escape from The Tower. At the end of Part One Selin appears to have finally broken off the weird epistolary romance, and the reader heaves a sigh of relief. But alas, early into Part Two Hungarian Ivan steps right back into the book, and we have to put up with him all the way through. Various ancillary characters—a Harvard psychiatrist, Selin’s friends, Ivan’s friends—express their negative opinions about the way Ivan strings Selin along. He has another semi-girlfriend, a fact he does not conceal from Selin. “I have a girlfriend whom I only sometimes love. I do think about you a lot. My love for you is for the person writing your letters.” Everything with Ivan is “semi,” not fully realized. But then, in maintaining the e-mail correspondence, Selin herself, dubious of passion and carnality, is equally at fault.
The Idiot is a love story about first love (at least Selin’s first love), but it is a passionless love between two confused lovers. Selin is certainly no idiot; on the contrary. But she is meek, unsure of herself, bogged down in adolescence, terrified of her sexuality. The biggest problem with the book is that precious few readers will want to journey through four hundred pages of Selin’s insipid life. Given the episodic nature of events, the piling up of nonessential scenes, the book would be better, say, at three hundred pages, not four hundred. A plethora of scenes could be omitted. A good place to begin the cuts would be with scenes involving Selin’s casual acquaintance Ralph, whose presence in the book serves little purpose.
The novel has a certain quirkiness to its action, almost a kind of surrealism, as if we are in some kind of absurdist play. Here are sample passages:
“The French director had died tragically, by falling off a barstool. ‘They say it might have been a suicide,’ Svetlana said.”
“At one point she laughed so violently that she dislocated her jaw. You could see it was something that happened to her regularly. She was in a lot of pain, but we couldn’t tell at first because her jaw was stuck in a laughing position.”
“Saint Istvan’s right hand was in a box somewhere. The Chain Bridge had been reconstructed after each world war. The sculptor of the lion statue was said to have drowned himself out of shame because the lions didn’t have tongues—though others said that if you looked closely in their mouths, you could see the tongues right there.”
“He had just started a new job in an office run by his father, having been fired from his previous position for biting a man’s ear.”
Funny stuff. Thank God for the humor in the novel, its only saving grace. Read the whole book and you learn about all kinds of words in all world languages. “The words for eggplant, bean, chickpea, and sour cherry were the same in Serbo-Croatian as in Turkish.” “Turkish, he said, was the only language that could express that there was indeed not much difference between a latrine and Ivan’s paternal aunt. It was full of Hungarian words, like for handcuffs and beard.” “The street looked empty but was full of words: ‘puddle,’ ‘mud,’ ‘bottle,’ ‘chocolate wrapper,’ ‘gum,’ ‘gum wrapper.’” In Hungarian the words for hello and goodbye are the same. So that the Beatles song in Hungarian would go like this: “Hello, hello, hello, I don’t know why you say hello, I say hello.”
The epigraph to The Idiot should be a famous line from the Russian poet, Tyutchev: “Any word when uttered is a lie.” Words are something of a snare, especially for the Hungarian friend Ivan, who prefers largely abstractions, being of the opinion that nothing concrete can really be pinned down and words are not to be trusted. In the long e-mail correspondence between Selin and Ivan he frequently rails against words, while Selin, the budding writer loves words. At one point he asks, “Is there a way to escape the triviality-dungeon of conversations?” Well, he has found that way in his relationship with Selin. We are halfway through the book before they have anything resembling a real conversation, and even then it is one-sided. Ivan blathers on and Selin, trapped in her prison of timidity, can’t think of anything to say.
In what could be the climax of the novel, only a few pages before the end, the long awaited real conversation between the two central characters finally arrives. Since both characters are reluctant to converse, however, they don’t really get anywhere again here. The reader feels like grabbing and shaking the both of them. At the end of the book Selin herself has lost her love of words: “When I got back to school in the fall, I changed my major from linguistics and didn’t take any more classes in the philosophy of language. They had let me down. I hadn’t learned what I had wanted to about how language worked. I hadn’t learned anything at all.”
Although Elif Batuman has published only two books, both very recently, she has already made it big time in the Eastern Literary Establishment. Many American writers would give their right writing hand to be where she already is. Ms. Batuman has a literary agent in the most prestigious agency in New York. She has hotshot editors on high, and her books are reviewed at the highest levels: The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, etc. No matter how good or bad her next novel is, it will without doubt be favorably reviewed at the same high levels. That’s the way the game works, after you are accepted into the in crowd.
So what Ms. Batuman needs to do at this point is stop listening to the hotshot establishment agents and editors and write something that is real literature. Unlike so many modern American writers, those who have come out of creative writing programs, she has taken the time to read the great writers; she knows what literature is. For her first novel I can imagine the agent telling her, “Stick to the timeworn pattern, don’t get far away from realism, describe the everyday life of a girl who resembles yourself. Write ‘domestic literary fiction,’ for this is what sells in America. Don’t get too cute in your first published work. Nobody needs too much creativity.” So she wrote a semi-autobiographical novel about her days at Harvard. Okay, she has listened to that spiel once, but now that she is in with the in crowd, she can write whatever she likes. She should.
Elif Batuman is aware of the vast wasteland that is the creative writing industry in the U.S. How do I know? Because in her nonfiction work, The Possessed (something of a companion work to The Idiot), she expresses strong opinions about that puerile industry. Just beginning her creative life, she drops in on a writing workshop on Cape Cod, where the lead guru tells her, “If you want to be an academic, go to graduate school; if you want to be a writer come here.” The implication is that you need not even read and discuss the great writers of the past. Instead you sit around reading and critiquing short stories by pedestrian writers who have read, largely, other pedestrian writers. Creative writing instructors, even those who have won awards, are often hopelessly boring, tedious and uninspired writers themselves, perpetuating the gruesome genre of “domestic literary realism.” How did they win the awards? Because the prizes are given out by other hopelessly mind-numbing writer/judges who write the same crap.
“For many years, I gave little thought to the choice I had made between creative writing and literary criticism. In 2006, n + I magazine asked me to write about the state of the American short story, using the Best American Short Stories anthologies of 2004 and 2005 as data. Only then, as I turned the pages in the name of science, did I find myself remembering the emptiness I had felt on that rainy day on Cape Cod” (The Possessed).
“I remembered then the puritanical culture of creative writing, embodied by colonies and workshops and the ideal of ‘craft.’ . . . . I thought it was the dictate of craft that had pared many of the Best American stories to a nearly unreadable core of brisk verbs and vivid nouns.”
This critique of the modern American short story goes on for two more pages and concludes as follows: “Contemporary short stories contain virtually no reference to any interesting work being done in the field over the past twenty, fifty, or hundred years; instead, middle-class women keep struggling with kleptomania, deviant siblings keep going in and out of institutions, people continue to be upset by power outages and natural disasters, and rueful writerly types go on hesitating about things.” Domestic literary realism. Urggh.
This revelation—that the “best stories” written in the U.S. in 2004 and 2005 (and, alas, any other recent year) are bad stories—should open the eyes of the writing world. But given that the whole writing industry and publishing enterprise prefers to proceed with eyes shut, nothing essentially will be changed. The New Yorker, at least half the time, is publishing this same dreck. So are all the most prestigious literary magazines. It is all, after all, about money, and literary trash sells in American. To the extent that anybody reads literature anymore, the realistic trash is what they read. Writers writing literary trash get published, even win awards. In creative writing programs all over the U.S. these writers teach their students to value the same twaddle. After which the students graduate, get positions as creative writing instructors, and perpetuate the problem. The best solution would be to abolish all creative writing departments in every university in the country. Then ban the genre of “domestic literary fiction.”
As is obvious, however, Elif Batuman is already aware of the Vast Egregious Boondoggle that is the contemporary American short story. I’m sure she is also aware that the people interested in selling books—her agent, her editors, all of the establishment literary world—would prefer that her next novel stay with realistic characters and pedestrian plots. She is in a position now to defy those agents and editors. Write something new, vivid, vital now, Elif. Something ambitious, something with literary panache. Write us a piece of Literature.
While I’m in the process of giving advice, here is a bit more. Time for you to get away from using Dostoevsky’s titles for your books. I wracked my brain to find anything in common between the tone, style, themes of Dostoevsky’s Idiot and yours. The two Idiots just have little in common. Your books (gratefully) have none of the melodrama and hysteria of Dostoevsky, none of the frantic pace. They have nice touches of humor, but not his dark humor.
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