In her new novel, Either/Or, Elif Batuman picks back up with Selin, the mesmerizing protagonist of her 2018 Pulitzer prize finalist novel, The Idiot (Read my review here for a refresher). Either/Or finds Selin returning to Harvard for her sophomore year after her disastrous summer spent in Hungary. At the onset of the novel, Ivan, the math grad student who consumed much of Selin’s thoughts throughout her freshman year, is studying in California, and Selin has no further insight into the complex emotional events of the prior year.
In her sophomore year, Selin has switched her major to literature, and Batuman once again uses Russian literature as a point-of-entry to Selin’s philosophical musings. This time, Selin encounters Soren Kierkegaard’s treatise Either/Or, which not only gives the novel its title, but also offers its central question: should Selin strive to live an aesthetic life or an ethical one? Kierkegaard posits that an aesthetic life, or a life lived as a work of art is the solution to avoiding a myopic existence, and more worthwhile than trying to do the right thing all of the time.
This idea initially attracts Selin, as she herself wants to be a writer, and a life lived in service of art feels right to her. She reflects, “What if I could use the aesthetic life as an algorithm to solve my two biggest problems: how to live, and how to write novels? In any real-life situation, I would pretend I was in a novel, and then do whatever I would want the person in the novel to do. Afterward, I would write it all down, and I would have written a novel, without having to invent a bunch of fake characters and pretend to care about them.” (Very meta, but more on that later). But Selin soon realizes that Kierkegaard’s vision for an aesthetic life mostly revolves around seducing and discarding young women, which feels quite alienating to her.
In an interview with NPR, Batuman explains: “When Selin researches how to live an aesthetic life, she’s really reading a lot of books that are written by men, and she’s learning that the person who lives an aesthetic life is a man, and the way that they do it is by seducing and abandoning young girls. And when I set out to write Either/Or it was in 2017 during the Me Too [movement], when a lot of women were revisiting their own sexual histories. I was, at that point, one year into a lesbian relationship for the first time in my life after only [ever] dating guys. One text that I read at that time was Compulsory Heterosexuality by Adrienne Rich, which blew my mind. It’s about the existence of a force that is sometimes secret, and sometimes not secret, that is always working in society to wrench women’s energies away from themselves and each other and towards men”.
Either/Or really centers the deeply complex nature of women’s desire, not only sexual, but also the desire to feel seen and respected by the art they consume. Selin experiences what I think many young women who arrive at classic literature (and this is also applicable to a very wide variety of disciplines) and realize that it excludes them. So many of these celebrated texts are built around the mistreatment of women, and Selin feels very deeply that sort of fracturing of identity when you realize something can both expand your mind and also oppress you. In Either/Or, Batuman really makes it a project to center the female experience of coming-of-age in a place that does not always embrace you, and the deeply complex nature of identity and equity.
The Idiot was a fairly straightforward coming-of-age novel, remarkable in the ways it bound together emotions, art, and intellect, and its refusal to come to easy questions. The magic of The Idiot, and now Either/Or as well, is how the novels manage to capture the frustrating and complex emotions of young adulthood, when one is learning a great deal about themselves and others, in a way that feels both deeply relatable but also hyper-specific to its narrator. To me, one of the great gifts of the sort of auto-fiction that Batuman is engaging in is that it imbues the narrative with this sort of meta-dimension, adding depth while refusing traditional narrative conventions. Either/Or only builds upon he philosophical musings of the first novel: still positing more questions than answering them, but also allowing its narrator to grow into her sexuality and personhood in really nuanced ways. Selin’s world is just such a delight to get lost in, Batuman has really found the perfect vessel for her exquisitely nuanced ideas and musings.