In these pages, Cathleen Schine called The Idiot “a romantic comedy about the romance of language, a metacomic novel of ideas, and an adventure in grammar.” * It’s praise that damns if you overthink it (as Batuman’s heroine surely would): Are ideas enough to make a novel? Either/Or is Batuman’s attempt to prove that they are. Doubtless some trend reporter is hatching a theory-the pervasive influence of streaming television, which parcels a story out into seasons? Another victory of capital in the sphere of art?īatuman wants to continue the story of Selin, but she’s up to more. Either/Or arrives amid a handful of other literary follow-ups: Jennifer Egan’s The Candy House, Andrew Sean Greer’s Less Is Lost, Tom Perrotta’s Tracy Flick Can’t Win. Either/Or, Batuman’s new novel, opens at the start of her sophomore year, its first line “It was dark when I got to Cambridge.” It’s a sequel in which we’re right back where we left off: there’s the deadpan voice, the anthropological insight into American college life in the mid-1990s, the catalog of minor humiliations and grandiose thoughts. The Idiot follows Selin through her freshman year. It’s a testament to her skill that Selin’s intellectual bravado and her attempts at seduction make readers cringe, remembering our own youthful pretensions and ill-fated crushes. It’s every friend or acquaintance Selin meets, because the essential qualities of being eighteen, nineteen, twenty-idiocy or just naiveté, a yearning to become-are Batuman’s subject. But it’s also Ivan, a classmate from beginning Russian with whom she’s besotted.

Who is the titular fool of Elif Batuman’s 2017 novel The Idiot? It’s plainly Selin, the heroine, a goofy kid from New Jersey with a hyperactive mind, freshly matriculated at Harvard.

The idiot elif batuman synopsis