The Idiot, Elif Batuman’s 2018 debut, is a coming of age story set against the onset of the digital age, in other words the novel’s protagonist is coming of age with our modern world. Selin, the daughter of Turkish immigrants, has arrived at Harvard for her freshmen year in the 1990s, armed with a love of literature and a desire to understand language and linguistics. The novel is set in the 1990s, so when Selin arrives in her dorm room and lifts an ethernet cable, she asks, “What do we do with this, hang ourselves?”. Not only is the internet new though, almost everything around Selin feels new or unfamiliar. She reflects, “I was surrounded, overwhelmed, by things of unknown or dubious meaning, things that weren’t commensurate to me in any way.” Searching for meaning and a concrete path, Selin strikes up a friendship with the charming and spirited Svetlana, whom she admires greatly for having strong opinions that aren’t swayed by the tide of popular opinion. Selin also begins an email correspondence with Ivan, a Hungarian math major from her Russian class, which becomes the central romance plot of the novel.
The relationship between Selin and Ivan is in many ways mediated by the internet, and while they do spend time together in person, Selin really becomes infatuated with Ivan’s email persona. She is constantly fretting over what email she could send him that could get him to open up, and send her a message with real emotion instead of his musings on a dream he’s had or his thoughts on the universe. In a way that anyone who’s ever had a crush or teenage romance can recognize, Selin hangs on Ivan’s every word, constantly considering what the things he’s said mean for her, finding his aloofness wholly fascinating. The novel has very little sexual tension, and it seems like the relationship between Ivan and Selin is more fraught with the tension held between Ivan’s manipulation and Selin’s devotion. Selin’s relationship with Ivan proves to be one more thing around her that she just can’t seem to find an answer to, another thing of unknown meaning in a year exploration and confusion.
Much like another hot novelist of the moment, Sally Rooney, Batuman’s commitment to getting inside the minds of young women is crucial to her project. Like Rooney, Batuman writes of Selin’s philosophical and intellectual reflections alongside her reflections on her personal life, intertwining threads about friendship and unrequited love with meditations on world cinema and classic literature. Throughout this novel, Selin is constantly learning more about herself and a wide variety of subjects, and no more weight is giver to her intellectual pursuits than to her interpersonal ones. Batuman’s narrative feels so authentic, especially to female readers, because it indulges in the everyday emotional life of its main character, never treating her as silly or infantile for waiting for her crush to call instead of working on her philosophy paper.
In an interview with Vox, Batuman said, “I think the novel has a potential to reintegrate… those things that we have dismissed as garbage. It’s a form of misogyny and classism to look down at garbage because it’s women and servants who deal with garbage. As if we can isolate those things.” This novel feels so refreshing because as a portrait of a young woman, it eschews pretensions that young people have themselves totally determined and are always focused on their intellectual pursuits, and rather delights in the interpersonal questions that animate scholarly debate. It feels like Batuman is making a very intentional connection between the close personal relationships that we have in our real lives, and our political beliefs about the world around us, and thinks it ignorant to discount the importance of those relationships in molding our mindsets and shaping our views.
The Idiot is a crucial part of an emerging sub-genre of female novelists who are reinventing the character study, centering the concerns of young women and de-centering traditional narrative structure. Relatively little action actually occurs in this novel, so the real central thread is Selin’s narration and the various ideas that she’s weighing at this particular moment in her life, a formative period where her identity is beginning to come into focus. In this sub-genre pioneered by novelists like Batuman, Otessa Moshfegh, Sally Rooney, Mona Awad, and somewhat prefigured by the likes of Joan Didion, young women rail against the expectations set for them and attempt to define themselves through complex and nuanced meditations on identity and philosophy. The Idiot is a fascinating and cerebral pseudo-romance, that explores the role of connection in a changing world, and the complex feelings that come with young adulthood. Batuman has said she is currently working on a sequel that will pick up in Selin’s sophomore year, so luckily this won’t be the final word from this unforgettable narrator.
Further Reading: Anything by Otessa Moshfegh would be a great companion to this one, or even a Sally Rooney novel if you enjoyed the psuedo-romance and pining.