The Idiot

One of the Pulitzer Prize finalists in 2018 was The Idiot, by Elif Batuman. The title comes from the book by Dostoevsky, as evidenced by Batuman's love of Russian novels. Who the idiot is, I can't say for sure; I suppose it is our narrator, in a story that is certainly autobiographical.

Batuman's stand-in is Selin, a freshman at Harvard. She is Turkish-American, and quickly makes friends, especially with Svetlana, who is from Serbia. She also forms an attachment to Ivan, a Hungarian math student. For the whole book she will pine for him, following him all the way to Hungary to teach children English, and their half-hearted stab at romance never quite gels.

Batuman's style of writing is incredibly funny, in a dry as lint kind of way. I was constantly stopping to make notes and marvel at some of her similes: "I was supposed to make the dessert, a raspberry angel food cake with raspberry amaretto sauce. I had never made an angel food cake before, and got really excited when it started to rise, but then I opened the oven too soon and it fell down in the middle, like a collapsing civilization."

She also makes some charming and interesting observations about things, ranging from Dumbo to the Beatles: "Before that summer, I knew almost nothing about the Beatles. I didn’t know why it was important to be a mop-top, or what a mop-top was. Whenever I heard older people talking about them, I just tuned it out. There were never any bad consequences. I really thought I could go through my whole life that way. But the Beatles turned out to be one of the things you couldn’t avoid, like alcohol, or death."

But the book's style is also a hazard. Selin's first year of school, and the following summer abroad, is arranged like a diary, with chapter headings like "July." That's all well and good for remarks like "We trudged to the Tuileries park, sat on iron chaises-longues, and stared at the fountain, which was full of ducks. It seemed very remarkable that you could travel halfway around the world and still end up looking at some ducks." But too often it's just an almost day-to-day recounting of one person's college life. She goes to class (usually she talks about her Russian class), hanging out with her roommates, going to movies, talking about books, and her email exchanges with Ivan.

Speaking of email, there is something disingenuous about Selin. She begins the book telling us she didn't know what email was. Considering it's 1996 or so, that's understandable. But throughout the book she's letting us know what she'd never heard of. It's hard to believe that a girl who could get into Harvard has never heard of: bruschetta, Stephen Spender, or Southern Comfort. Perhaps the title means she is an idiot savant, who has huge holes in her education?

Anyway, there's not much of a plot, and the book could stand to be edited with hedge clippers. It's too long to spend with one person who mopes a lot, and is constantly poring over Ivan's words like an entomologist studying crickets, hoping to find some meaning. As she goes back to school for her second semester, the book doesn't end, it just stops.

I think if the book had been much shorter and the conflict wasn't so flimsy (will she and Ivan get together? Who cares?) this could have been a classic college novel. As it is, I'm glad I didn't go to Harvard.