“Either/Or” by Elif Batuman

This sequel in Batuman’s chronicle of her narrator, Selin’s, time at Harvard takes the reader through sophomore year. There is her still unrequited love for her now-graduated beau, Ivan, her deep late-night conversations with her best friend, Svetlana, her navigating the living situation with her new roommate, Riley, and her budding attempts at her own career in writing. “Well, that’s just it, I thought: you didn’t just write down a raw cry of suffering. It would be boring and self-indulgent. You had to disguise it, turn it into art. That’s what literature was. That was what required talent, and made people want to read what you wrote, and then they would give you money.” In her creative writing class, at least, she is self-aware, “Everything we wrote was awful. Why did we have to talk about it? All the suggestions felt random and performative.”

Despite her more grownup aspirations, Selin is still very much a college student. “I was still the kind of person who thought it was interesting to see what happened if you only ate cashews for a week.” Her discussions with Svetlana drip with academic jargon. “We talked a lot about whether different things were a content or a form.” Selin also continues to take intensive Russian language classes, “A famous Soviet bard died. All the Russian instructors were depressed…. In his honor, all the Russian students had to memorize poems by Pushkin. This made sense according to Russian people’s logic, where everything always connected to Pushkin.” Much of this novel focuses on Selin’s attempts to get over Ivan and to develop her own love life. “Obviously all the girls, whether they talked about it or not, were on the lookout for any reprieve from the hassle of not having a boyfriend: the way it exposed you to censure and nosiness…. This thing with the boyfriends—it wasn’t a passing fad. Nothing would go back to how it had been. It would become more and more like the way it was.”

Re the title of the novel, there are numerous Kierkegaard-inspired digressions on the nobility of the ethical versus the aesthetic life. “I felt it was the time for stocktaking: for looking back at what I had learned about the aesthetic life…. In its simplest form, the aesthetic life involved seducing and abandoning young girls and making them go crazy. This is what I had learned from books…. What were you supposed to do now: seduce and abandon men? Was that what feminism made possible? Something about the idea didn’t feel aesthetic.”