“For a while now, I’ve been conscious of a tension in my relationship with you,” Svetlana said. “And I think that’s the reason. It’s because we both make up narratives about our own lives….“
“Everyone makes up narratives about their own lives.”
“But not to the same extent. Think about my roommates. Fern, for example. I don’t mean that she doesn’t have an inner life, or that she doesn’t think about the past or make plans for the future. But she doesn’t compulsively rehash everything that happens to her in the form of a story. She’s in my story – I’m not in hers. That makes her and me unequal, but it also gives our relationship a kind of stability, and safeness. We each have our different roles. It’s like an unspoken contract. With you, there’s more instability and tension, because I know you’re making up a story, too, and in your story I’m just a character.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I still think everyone experiences their own life as a narrative. If you didn’t have some kind of ongoing story in mind, how would you know who you were when you woke up in the morning?”
“That’s a weak definition of narrative. That’s saying that narrative is just memory plus causality. But, for us, the narrative has aesthetics, too.”
A long time ago, my favorite ice cream flavor was Cherry Vanilla. Oh, the ice cream was mediocre – the vanilla was more aspirational than actual – but the cherries were amazing to my very young palate. It was a delight, on taking a mouthful of bland milky coldness, to suddenly come across a sweet piece of maraschino, just waiting to be bitten into and chewed.
That was my first read of this book. Overall, it seemed… disconnected, aimless. But it was loaded with wonderful cherries, like the quote above. So I kept reading.
My second read – really, at first more of a skim, looking for cherries to pick out and quote, that turned into a semi-read – was more like when I discovered Ben & Jerry’s Cherry Garcia years later. The ice cream had a wonderful flavor and texture of its own, and the cherries – oh, the cherries were even better, because they were real dark red-black cherries, often whole ones, not the slivers of candied maraschinos from my past. And then there were the fudge flakes, which weren’t there before at all.
It all started, that second read, with the ultimate fudge flake, the epigraph from Proust:
But the characteristic feature of the ridiculous age I was going through—awkward indeed but by no means infertile—is that we do not consult our intelligence and that the most trivial attributes of other people seem to us to form an inseparable part of their personality. In a world thronged with monsters and with gods, we know little peace of mind. There is hardly a single action we perform in that phase which we would not give anything, in later life, to be able to annul. Whereas what we ought to regret is that we no longer possess the spontaneity which made us perform them. In later life we look at things in a more practical way, in full conformity with the rest of society, but adolescence is the only period in which we learn anything.
MARCEL PROUST, In Search of Lost Time, Volume II: Within a Budding Grove
What made this stand out a lot more than it had before was reading it almost immediately after reading the final paragraph of the book:
When I got back to school in the fall, I changed my major from linguistics and didn’t take any more classes in the philosophy or psychology of language. They had let me down. I hadn’t learned what I had wanted to about how language worked. I hadn’t learned anything at all.
That final paragraph struck me as seriously ironic. Selin – the protagonist of the book – maybe hadn’t learned what she expected to learn, or what she wanted to learn, as reality rolled over her naïve assumptions of what she’d learn. But she’d definitely learned a lot. If nothing else, she’d learned that nobody knew what they were doing, and knowing you don’t know is the beginning of wisdom. Ahem, forgive me, I’ve been hanging out with Socrates way too much over the past few months, scratch that last thing as my own imposition upon the text.
I chose to read this because so many reviewers were wetting their pants over it, both when it was originally published in 2017, and when her second book, Either/Or, came out in May 2022. Initially I’d demurred, because I felt like I would have to read Dostoevsky first, and while that’s something I’m probably going to have to do some day if I live long enough, I didn’t feel like slogging through 700 pages of Russian angst quite yet. Then I found out Batuman’s Idiot was a Harvard freshman, which made it a campus novel, and since I love campus novels, I brought it home. Too late, I discovered only the first half is a campus novel. And, like a lot of campus novels, it soaks itself in a blighted romance before it turns into a combination travelogue and coming-of-age story. If eighteen – nineteen, actually – seems a little late for coming of age these days, well, either there was a resurgence of virginity in the 1995 Harvard freshman class, or Batuman chose to make her character – several characters – especially naïve.
The naïveté starts with the very first paragraph:
I didn’t know what email was until I got to college. I had heard of email, and I knew that in some sense I would ‘have’ it….
Insofar as I’d had any idea about it at all, I had imagined that email would resemble faxing, and would involve a printer. But there was no printer. There was another world. You could access it from certain computers, which were scattered throughout the ordinary landscape, and looked no different from regular computers. Always there, unchanged, in a configuration nobody else could see, was a glowing list of messages from all the people you knew, and from people you didn’t know, all in the same letters, like the universal handwriting of thought or of the world. Some messages were formally epistolary, with “Dear” and “Sincerely”; others telegraphic, all in lowercase with missing punctuation, like they were being beamed straight from people’s brains. And each message contained the one that had come before, so your own words came back to you—all the words you threw out, they came back. It was like the story of your relations with others, the story of the intersection of your life with other lives, was constantly being recorded and updated, and you could check it at any time.
It’s a bit disorienting to read that someone who is smart enough to get into college – Harvard, no less – might not know much about email, but, although it isn’t clear for quite a while, the story begins in 1995. Yet it presents the recurring surprise with which Selin experiences the world. When you read her description of email, you begin to get the sense of how strange the world seems to her. It’s also notable that email plays a large part in the blighted romance that eventually serves as something like a backbone of the story, combining the strangeness of the world with the strangeness of language: she and her love interest, fellow students in a Russian class, begin an email correspondence as characters in a Russian story used as a text in the class, but their conversation eventually moves towards actual communication while allowing them both to hide behind the pretense should it be necessary.
Language, with all its strangeness and wonders, comprises many of the cherries in the book. No, it’s more than that: Selin’s journey through language, from wanting to learn about it, to being befuddled by it, to giving up on it, may be the core plot of the book, via both her Russian class and the Creating Worlds class. Then again, I’m fond of language, so it’s what stood out to me. Maybe someone else would find another core.
She notices the story used in the Russian class only uses the grammar they have learned so far: “while you were reading you felt totally inside its world, a world where reality mirrored the grammar constraints, and what Slavic 101 couldn’t name didn’t exist. There was no ‘went’ or ‘sent,’ no intention or causality.…” This brings her to the already discarded Sapir-Whorf hypothesis that language affects how we see the world. It strikes us both that the Slavic 101 world was created from the language that was available, not the other way around. Her study of Russian leads to her relationship with Ivan, a Senior who she too late discovers not only has a girlfriend but is leaving for California at the end of the semester. Oops. Over the summer, she follows him to his native Hungary as part of a program to teach English to rural Hungarians, then watches him leave the airport for Japan: “He turned and walked into the revolving doors. When the compartment reappeared, it was empty.” Ouch. I felt that. Some cherries are painful.
Facing literature in academia is another struggle for her.
It was hard to decide on a literature course. Everything the professors said seemed to be somehow beside the point. You wanted to know why Anna had to die, and instead they told you that nineteenth-century Russian landowners felt conflicted about whether they were really a part of Europe. The implication was that it was somehow naive to want to talk about anything interesting, or to think that you would ever know anything important.
I wasn’t interested in society, or ancient people’s money troubles. I wanted to know what books really meant. That was how my mother and I had always talked about literature. “I need you to read this, too,” she would say, handing me a New Yorker story in which an unhappily married man had to get a rabies shot, “so you can tell me what it really means.” She believed, and I did, too, that every story had a central meaning. You could get that meaning, or you could miss it completely.
On second read, this became a fudge flake: it’s one of those things she might have learned, that maybe there is no “real meaning” to books, that why Anna had to die is as valid an approach to Tolstoy as the Russian economy. She just doesn’t have the confidence to own it yet.
Russian literature comes up a lot during the book, though not Prince Myshkin so much as other Dostoevsky and Tolstoy characters. In an interview with the Harvard Crimson, Batuman said she saw similarities between Selin and Myshkin, but she really felt the “idiot” title was generated by her embarrassment on reading, after almost twenty years, her mostly autobiographical first draft. The rewrite became more fictional, but Selin remained baffled by the world.
She brings up War and Peace in connection with her trip to Hungary: how the book had so many characters who became important for a chapter or so, then disappeared. She relates that to staying with a family for a couple of weeks, then moving on to another family. I see it as relating to the book as a whole. There are three main characters who persist – Selin, Ivan, and Svetlana – but everyone else fades out pretty quickly.
She has a marvelous epiphany while reading the Russian story about Nina searching for her lost Ivan:
I found myself remembering the day in kindergarten when the teachers showed us Dumbo, and I realized for the first time that all the kids in the class, even the bullies, rooted for Dumbo, against Dumbo’s tormentors. Invariably they laughed and cheered, both when Dumbo succeeded and when bad things happened to his enemies. But they’re you, I thought to myself. How did they not know? They didn’t know. It was astounding, an astounding truth. Everyone thought they were Dumbo.
Thing is, as much as I love this particular cherry, I don’t agree with it. I’ve been in groups where nearly everyone thinks either Dumbo should stop whining, or should start kicking ass. Empathy and compassion seem to be in short supply these days.
Selin encounters all manner of absurdity throughout the book. A fellow student tells how he went to an interview to apply for a science class, and the professor merely had him wash lab equipment. She and her friend Svetlana take a trolley to Euclid Circle, and discover there is no Euclid Circle: “just a concrete platform with a pay phone and a sign that read EUCLID CIRCLE.” Then ensues a debate about whether Euclid would be mad, or honored.
Then there’s Just Enough Hungarian, the phrase book she gets for her trip to Hungary to teach English:
I leafed through the phrase book. If a Martian read it, the Martian would probably decide to avoid Hungary.
“I’d like something for (snake bites, dog bites, burns, sore gums, bee stings). I’d like some (antiseptic, gauze, bandages, inhalant). It’s a (sharp pain, dull ache, nagging pain). I feel (sick dizzy, weak, feverish). I have (heart condition, rheumatism, hemorrhoids). It hurts. It hurts a lot.…
“The toilet is blocked. The gas is leaking. The boiler is not working. I have a toothache. I have broken my dentures. I have lost (my contact lenses, a filling, my bag, my car keys, my car, everything)….”
… The “butcher” vocabulary included a drawing of a cow divided into thirteen numbered sectors. How remarkable that you were supposed to be able to name thirteen cuts of beef, after you had been bitten by a snake and your car was stolen.
I use dictation software rather than typing out all these things, but reading this aloud had me laughing so hard I had to give it up and type. What really takes the cake is that there is an actual book with that title and with the cover she describes: “three women or dolls, with a long skirts and no feet, balancing beakers of red wine on their heads.” I’m tempted to get a copy. In the meantime, I’ve been collecting weird Duolingo quotes like “The elephant doesn’t like the bathroom” and “For my lawyer, a sparking apple juice.”
Chalk up another learning experience: the world can be an absurd place.
Writing comes up with some frequency as well. Selin writes a story for her Creating Worlds class; it wins a prize. Email writing is of course a big part of things. But there’s a lot of consideration of a philosophy of writing as well: “Suddenly it occurred to me that maybe the point of writing wasn’t just to record something past but also to prolong the present, like in One Thousand and One Nights, to stretch out the time until the next thing happened….” I wonder about that. People write about their failures, traumas, mistakes; they regularly code them into fiction. Why do we want to prolong such things? To desensitize? To understand?
The most direct view of the writing life comes when Selin, staying with a strange Hungarian family (because why bother with normal ones), thinks about a fellow classmate:
Meredith Wittman was doing a summer internship at New York magazine, and for a moment now I reflected on the fact that, although Meredith Wittman and I both wanted to be writers, she was going about it by interning at a magazine, whereas I was sitting at this table in a Hungarian village trying to formulate the phrase “musically talented” in Russian, so I could say something encouraging by proxy to an off-putting child whose father had just punched him in the stomach. I couldn’t help thinking that Meredith Wittman’s approach seemed more direct.
Different people, different paths. One may be easier, but who’s to say which is best. Batuman hasn’t done so bad: she published a collection of essays about her graduate years at Stanford in the memoir Possessed way back in 2010, and though the novel took a while, The Idiot was a finalist for a Pulitzer.
I found it interesting that Selin encounters the distinction between aesthetics and ethics several times. Batuman’s second book, a chapter of which is included in the paperback edition of The Idiot, is titled Either/Or, which of course is Kierkegaard’s debate between the aesthetic life and the ethical approach, a theme I understand is central in her book. It does continue Selin’s college career, and both Ivan and Svetlana appear in the first chapter. After my first read, I doubted if I’d continue the saga; after my second, I’m looking forward to it.
A Just Recompense 