Book Review:
The Idiot (2022) by Elif Batuman
OCTOBER 25, 2024 – The Idiot is a novel about Selin, a freshman at Harvard studying linguistics. Selin is the daughter of Turkish immigrants who settled in New Jersey. The book is set on campus in Boston, and later in the novel, France, Hungary and Turkey. The year is 1995. I didn’t like the book, but there were parts that I loved.
What I loved the most was the novel's ability to capture the silent madness of having a crush. We experience Selin in her first year of university, but also her first time away from home and her first opportunity to discover the limits of her own agency. At the beginning of the semester, Selin enlists in different classes: literature, nonfiction film, Russian conversation, and a seminar called Constructed Worlds. It is in the Russian class where she meets Ivan, an older mathematics student, and they begin an email correspondence. E-mail is new and mystical. Selin ponders about the archival powers of email – of messages never disappearing, of having a record of everything you have ever said to somebody.
The Idiot is full of many intersecting and sometimes disconnected threads – campus minutiae, Hungarian village life, teaching English as a second language. But Selin’s longing towards Ivan is the thread we follow from beginning to end. When they start e-mailing, their correspondence is charged with tension – in person, their interactions even more. Selin stands beside Ivan and she feels a wave of physical attraction come over her. She wonders about his hands and the ordinary things he does with them. She compares herself against Ivan’s potential mates. Ivan seems to reciprocate, but you cannot help but doubt his intentions with Selin. He’s older, tall, handsome, intelligent and evasive. He flirts with Selin and then introduces her to his girlfriend, Eunice. Selin’s mom cautions her against Ivan, calling him a womanizer.
Selin’s narration is comprised of many astute observations. She is an intelligent and naïve overthinker who categorizes the world around her to quell her own insecurities. Midway through the novel, Ivan and Selin are walking together late at night outside campus. A man interrupts them in a dark street corner and tells them he’s selling books. Selin’s instinct is to avert her eyes and change her course – a feminized response. Ivan does the opposite and engages the strange man in conversation. Selin is awestruck:
I was overcome by Ivan’s sense of Freedom. I realized for the first time that if you were a guy, if you were some tall guy who looked like Ivan, you could pretty much stop to look at anything you wanted, whenever you felt like it. And because I was walking with him now, for just this moment, I had a special dispensation, I could look at whatever he was looking at, too.
The insidious nature of power is one of the novel’s undercurrents. In walking alongside Ivan, Selin realizes she is able to share in his power to gaze and move freely in the world. Her attraction for him grows. Later, in the novel’s dénouement, when Selin and Ivan finally have a sober conversation free of any pretense, Ivan admits to using his power against her, that he knew she desired him, that it was always harder for her between them, and that he kept playing along because it made him feel good.
What I didn’t like about the book was its plotlessness. The pace of the book fell quite flat. Many parts seemed inconsequential. But this might be a matter of personal taste. I would place The Idiot on the same shelf as In Search of Lost Time or Ulysses, novels where long pages of description are spent on an event which might last only a few seconds in real time. I was once a fan of these meandering books, but now not so much. Batuman herself has urged people to write “long novels, pointless novels” so I don’t think I’m too far off.
Book club scores out of 10
In The Idiot, the stakes never felt high enough for me to care about where Selin was going. She was a generally dispassionate narrator who went with the whims of other people’s decisions. There was no force coming from any of the characters nor the events. I don’t think I could have finished this book had it not been the choice for my book club. But still I find it interesting how much I can sing its praises despite not having enjoyed it as a whole. Would I recommend it to people? Depends. If you like Proust, sure. If you like your novels full of long, inconsequential description, maybe. I’m in the middle of reading the sequel Either/Or, and I’m enjoying it much more than this first one.
