Elif Batuman’s ‘The Idiot’ is a portrait of the artist as a young woman
In “The Possessed” (2010), her smart and spirited chronicle of her obsession with Russian literature, Elif Batuman described her younger self as someone who cared more about beauty than truth — before adding that life would teach her the two are one and the same.
“The Idiot,” Batuman’s semi-autographical first novel, stretches a brief anecdote in “The Possessed” about first love into a full chronicle of lost illusions, featuring a heroine awakening to the realization that beauty cannot exist apart from the world, with its attendant disappointment, hurt and pain. It’s a funny, thoughtful and poignant portrait of an artist as a young woman.
Batuman has named that artist “Selin,” and it’s she who tells us the story of Selin’s first year as a Harvard undergrad, in 1995. She spends much of that year consumed by her crush on a senior named Ivan, a Hungarian she meets in her first-year Russian class.
That relationship takes off through email — even though Selin tells us, in the novel’s first sentence, that “I didn’t know what email was until I got to college.”
Because both Ivan and Selin are prone to thinking in abstractions and attracted to the beauty of seemingly closed systems explaining the world — he as a math major, she as a linguistics major — email is an ideal medium. It allows them to construct a perfect and beautiful story, while avoiding much of the give-and-take required by day-to-day life. They don’t fare nearly as well in person. “In his physical presence it was impossible to believe that he had written me those emails,” Selin tells us. “I fear the triviality of conversations,” Ivan emails her. “My love for you is for the person writing your letters.”
It’s really hard to love Ivan. He’s selfish and manipulative; he toys with Selin’s emotions. Repeatedly tries to make her drink. Passively foists blame on her for twists and turns in the relationship, even though they’re driven by his decisions. And, as we will see, withholds crucial details regarding his life.
None of which slows Selin down. By year’s end, she’s even committed to spending five weeks over the summer teaching English in Hungarian villages, just so she might be close to Ivan in Budapest.
“It can be really exasperating to look back at your past,” Selin admits, echoing the novel’s epigraph from Proust, about how badly we’d like to annul every action we’d taken as adolescents.
But again like Proust, Batuman can also be tender and compassionate toward this younger self, who slowly realizes that with Ivan and so much else, one can’t live a beautiful dream in one’s head, imagining the world as it should be. One must instead try to engage the world, even though it means accepting that communication is imperfect and often comical.
That’s true when Selin tries teaching English to a Dominican plumber in Boston or children in Hungary. It’s true as Selin negotiates boundaries with roommates and friends, while seriously asking herself, “how were you supposed to talk about people?” It’s true of her writing, which she is afraid to show others even though she rightly believes it’s good.
Batuman takes her time with this journey of self-discovery; readers looking for propulsive narrative drive ought to look elsewhere. “The Idiot” meanders; it’s willing to risk coming off as slow (sometimes, it is).
I suspect that this approach is deliberate. Reflecting her reading in Mann’s “The Magic Mountain,” Selin muses that time itself changes pace, allowing some days to feel intensely alive while others are “unthinkably dead.”
In life, as Batuman noted in “The Possessed,” “events and places succeed one another like items on a shopping list. There may be interesting and moving experiences,” but “they won’t naturally assume the shape of a wonderful book.” There is plenty that moves and is interesting, here; the truth with which it unfolds gives it a wonder and beauty all its own.