“The Idiot” by Elif Batuman

Batuman’s turn at auto-fiction is lightly amusing with academic flourishes peppered throughout. The plot details the narrator, Selin’s, first year at Harvard. She is a typical freshman. “I was thinking about the structural equivalences between a tissue box and a book: both consisted of slips of white paper in a cardboard case; yet—and this was ironic—there was very little functional equivalence, especially if the book wasn’t yours. These were the kinds of things I thought about all the time, even though they were neither pleasant nor useful. I had no idea what you were supposed to be thinking about.”

Much of the novel focuses on Selin’s complicated relationship with a senior boy from her Russian class, Ivan, with whom she has fallen in love. “I wanted to write back right away, but he had waited a whole day, so I knew I had to wait at least that long.” Her dorm-mate, Svetlana, is always giving out advice, “I get that you despise convention, but you shouldn’t let it get to the point that you’re incapable of saying, ‘Fine, thanks,’ just because it isn’t an original, brilliant utterance. You can’t be unconventional in every aspect of life. People will get the wrong idea.”

Selin visits a campus shrink for more advice. “I told him my theory. Most people, the minute they met you, were sizing you up for some competition for resources. It was as if everyone lived in fear of a shipwreck, where only so many people would fit on the lifeboat, and they were constantly trying to stake out their property and identify dispensable people—people they could get rid of.” Through the challenges of her first year, she also lives by her own heuristics. “My policy at the time was that, when confronted by two courses of action, one should always choose the less conservative and more generous.” She often philosophizes to herself. “There were lots of ways things could have turned out, and you had to memorize the particular one that was real. Or . . . did you? Was there only one way the world could have turned out? If you were smart enough, could you deduce it? A tiny part of me held out the hope that you could.”

Selin ends up spending the summer teaching English in Hungary, primarily because Ivan is from Budapest. Ivan also philosophizes, in his own way. He also really likes Dostoevsky and is a fan of Raskolnikov, “What’s so bad, practically, about killing an old woman who nobody likes? Personally, that old woman makes me really mad. I see women like that on the train all the time. They always expect you to give them your seat. Sometimes I’m reading, and it really makes me mad that I have to give her my seat so she can just sit there and think nothing.” Selin wonders how much of Ivan’s personality is tied in with the Hungarian national character. “How did you separate where someone was from, from who they were?” She is young, in love for the first time, and trying to figure it all out. “But, to me, nineteen still felt old and somehow alien to who I was. It occurred to me that it might take more than a year—maybe as many as seven years—to learn to feel nineteen.”