The Idiot (2017)
By Elif Batuman
Penguin, 423 pages.
★★★
The Idiot was the
finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and I can see why. So why did I give it just
three of five stars? This is the kind of novel people who care about serious
literature want to love. How readers outside the academic world will receive it
an open question. My take is that the book is impressively written, clever, and
sometimes blindingly funny, but also self-indulgent and overly showy.
Parts of the novel are semi-autobiographical. Ms. Batuman is
indeed a child of Turkish immigrants, attended Harvard, has a facility with
languages, and is highly intelligent. The
idiot it about how she began to know herself, a discovery that included the
realization that she was destined to become a writer. She obtained a PhD in
comparative literature from Stanford and has been able to follow her vocation.
Batuman's debut novel—she has also has penned a memoir and
has toiled as a journalist—follows Selin, her thinly veiled alter ego, through
her first year at Harvard, her first crush, and her transition from prolonged
adolescence to adulthood. I wonder what people at Harvard will make of this
book. By one reading, Harvard is indeed a holdout against dumbed-down
curricula; from another it's a bastion of cluelessness when it comes to
functioning in the everyday world. Selin's first year is spent studying
linguistics and engaging in deep contemplation over topics such as Noam
Chomsky's belief in transformational generative grammar versus the Sapir-Whorf
hypothesis of language relativity. That's pretty heady stuff for anyone, let
alone a first-year. Selin also studies Russian, Hungarian, and several other
languages; she is multilingual, not bilingual. Her days are spent studying well
into the next morning, trying to find time to spend with her new friend
Svetlana, and pining over an older Hungarian student, Ivan. She's besotted with
Ivan, which is odd given that much of her contract with him is through email, a
new thing in 1995, when this book is set. Those conversations often wrestle
with whether there is any meaning at all in language, and if it's possible to
exist beyond words. Does this make Selin a towering intellect, or the book's
namesake idiot?
One thing is certain; she's socially gauche. She knows next
to nothing about being a young person, about campus culture, or affairs of the
heart. Nor is she very good at practical things such as what to do in a bar,
how to choose food, or how to tutor young people. Selin's journey, both physically
and psychologically, takes her from New Jersey to Massachusetts, then to Paris,
Hungary, and Turkey. She is often so far outside her element that her travails imbue
this novel with humor bordering on absurdity. Much of the time Selin drifts
through situations as it she's a character in an opéra bouffe. The reader
wonders what she actually sees in Ivan, who frequently comes across as a
self-centered jerk hiding behind a wall of half-baked ideas posing as
profundity. Is Ivan really deep intellectually,
or just in the barnyard sense?
Many of us recall early college years and can relate to Selin's
feelings of uncertainty and struggles with self-esteem. I think, though, that Selin
would have been a stronger character if cast as a first-generation Turkish
immigrant, not one born in United States. It stretches credulity to imagine how
anyone so interested in other languages and cultures could've gotten to Harvard
having learned so little about of American society. Batuman's attempt to write around
Selin's awkwardness through passing references to a broken home and a doting-but-domineering
mother are not quite convincing.
I admired Bautman's honesty in casting her alter ego as neither
heroine nor victim. Selin's attempts to tutor or teach are painful to read. I
related to this, as I have personally witnessed former colleagues who needed to
find other work, because they simply lacked the disposition to instruct others.
On the other hand, the writer who must write has become a tired convention in
modern literature. It's also self-serving. One feels as if Batuman is seeking
affirmation for her life path, though no one disputed that in the first place.
As a literary device, this contrivance means that some of the book's drama and revelations
induce more shrugs than huzzahs.
There's also a matter of tone. If the goal is to show
readers how new thoughts can blow a first-year student's mind, Batuman hits the
target. Yet the tone is such that Batuman also appears to toot her own horn in
ways that seek to convince us that she has a superior mind. Maybe she does, but
is this necessary to advance the plot? As a title, The Idiot is ironic; Selin is both at sea, but she has more than
adequate tools to make it to shore. Through her heavier emphasis on her
intellectual confusion rather than coming to grips with growing up, Batuman
will thrill academicians more than casual readers. As one who straddles the
worlds of higher education and community life, I must give The Idiot a mixed review. It's not at all clear to me that Selin/Batuman
has yet mastered life beyond the ivied walls of Harvard's Widener Library.
Rob Weir
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