Sophomore angst plays out in sequel
Elif Batuman brings back the tedium and exhilaration of undergraduate life in “Either/Or,” a charming, mordantly funny follow-up to her first novel, “The Idiot,” which was a finalist for the 2018 Pulitzer Prize.
Selin, the overachieving daughter of Turkish immigrants and Batuman’s alter ego, spent much of that book mooning over Ivan, an older, emotionally unavailable boy in her Russian class.
In “Either/Or,” whose title nods to the Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard’s treatise on the aesthetic versus the ethical life, Selin decides to opt for the former and become the writer she has longed to be since childhood. “I found the idea of an aesthetic life to be tremendously compelling,” she says. “It was the first time I had heard of an organizing principle or goal you could have for your life, other than making money and having kids.”
The rest of the novel is devoted to the question of how — and whether it’s OK when virtually all her friends and family members have opted for the other, presumably more ethical, life. In the course of her explorations, she will read Andre Breton’s surrealist work “Nadja” but wonder why the titular character — naturally, a woman — has to go crazy and end up alone.
Besides her beloved books, Selin also seeks wisdom in the movies and pop songs of the late 1990s, resolves to lose her virginity and consults a psychiatrist to deal with unexplained crying jags. It all makes for an eventful year, albeit one recounted in a meandering, stream-of-consciousness style that threatens at times to sap the book of its narrative power.
The triumphal ending,
coming after hundreds of pages of sophomore angst, suggests that Selin is well on her way to becoming Batuman, an accomplished novelist and New Yorker staff writer. — Ann Levin, Associated Press
Two Americas collided in the few minutes
that Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin pressed his knee into the neck of George Floyd on May 25, 2020, after a shopkeeper complained that the 6-foot-6 Floyd had passed a counterfeit $20 bill at a store.
According to the new book “His Name is George Floyd: One Man’s Life and the Struggle for Racial Justice,” Chauvin, a white, 5-foot-9 police veteran, had become a “cowboy” on patrol, a practitioner of rough policing tactics. He had grown up a child of divorced parents but attended good schools and found his way to policing after taking related college courses.
Floyd’s childhood was starkly different. Floyd was a cheerful child, saying he wanted to “be someone” — a Supreme Court justice, for example.
But just surviving the drug-infested, povertystricken, violence-prone neighborhood where he grew up was an accomplishment
of note. With better schools and a more stable neighborhood, it’s easy to envision a different adult passage for Floyd.
Floyd’s record of drug abuse, robbery and other minor crimes, plus his intimidating size, were offered as justification for Chauvin’s tactics to subdue the much bigger man. But it’s easy to envision a different life for Floyd had he not grown up in a neighborhood infested with crime, illicit drugs and poor schools.
The authors, Washington Post reporters Robert Samuels and Toluse Olorunnipa, say in the book’s introduction that they don’t want to absolve Floyd of responsibility for his actions but rather are striving to analyze the policies that affected Floyd’s life. And they do a masterful, thorough and evenhanded job of this.
Floyd supporters say justice was achieved in Chauvin’s conviction but whether the case led to a national examination of conscience is tougher to answer. What does seem clear is that George Floyd’s name will be remembered as a prominent casualty of the racial and economic gulf in America.