Coming-of-age millenial stories must be thick on the ground these days. Without seeking them out, several have come my way in the last few months — two by Sally Rooney, one by Naoise Dolan, and now, Elif Batuman’s The Idiot, making its own contribution to the genre. They feature intelligent and intellectual young women, who are piercingly observant and almost casually subversive, and who are still searching for a sense of self. I see these authors as creating their own modern female versions of Catcher in the Rye (but perhaps, a little less pretentious).
Batuman’s protagonist is Selin, her parents are Turkish immigrants to the US, and she is a freshman at Harvard in 1995. If you thought Harvard students were all Type A overachievers who had their career paths mapped out by the time they were in middle school, meet Selin. She is smart but also directionless. She takes placement tests, applies to random seminars, and seems to get little useful advice from her advisor. Her train of thought is constantly sidetracked by her observations. While talking to a professor, she sneezes and looks for a tissue in this office full of books:
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.
Selin knows very few people: she has two suitemates, Hannah and Angela, and bumps into someone she knows, Ralph.
Ralph was categorized in my mind as the kind of person I would never truly be friends with, because he was so handsome, and so good at relating to adults. He was what my mother called, in Turkish, a ‘family boy’: clean-cut, well-spoken, the type who didn’t mind wearing a suit or talking to his parents’ friends.
She auditions for the college orchestra but does not get in. She ‘didn’t have a religion, and didn’t do team sports’, so her social interactions are limited to her classes. She has an interest in language and literature, and signs up for assorted classes including one in beginning Russian, which turns out to be a pivotal event in her life.
We all had to have Russian names, too. […] Greg became Grisha, Katie became Katya. There were two foreign students whose names didn’t change — Ivan from Hungary and Svetlana from Yuogslavia.
Svetlana and Ivan become central to the story and Selin’s life. The first section of the novel drifts on with descriptions of miniscule events in Selin’s classes, quotidian events in her day, and always, wry observations.
It was a mystery to me how Svetlana generated so many opinions. […] Meanwhile, I went from class to class, read hundreds, thousands of pages of the distilled ideas of the great thinkers of human history, and nothing happened.
There are periodic interesting digressions about language and languages.
I knew I thought differently in Turkish and in English — not because thought and language were the same, but because different languages forced you to think about different things. Turkish, for example, had a suffix, -mis, that you put on verbs to report anything you didn’t witness personally. You were always stating your degree of subjectivity. You were always thinking about it, every time you opened your mouth.
The suffix -mis had no English equivalent. [..] “You complained-mis to your mother,” Dilek would tell me. “The dog scared-mis you.” […] When you heard -mis, you knew that you had been invoked in your absence — not just you but your hypocrisy, your cowardice […]. Every time I heard it, I felt caught out. I was scared of the dogs. I did complain to my mother, often.
In Russian class, they read a simple story about Nina and Ivan, and have to act it out. Selin is paired with the real-life Ivan, and this starts a relationship that exists almost entirely via that new technology, email (1995, remember?)
The book hits a slump after the first quarter, when essentially the same events keep happening with no forward progress. Selin emails Ivan, Selin waits for Ivan to respond, Selin bumps into Ivan in passing and a brief awkward conversation ensues…
The detailed conversations get rather tedious.
“This is Selin, who I told you about,” he told her.
“What?” she said
“Selin,” he repeated, “this is Selin.”
“Nice to meet you,” I said, extending my hand.
“Oh!” she said.
I briefly held a small, cold, unenthusiastic object.
“I talked to Vogel”, the girl told Ivan, retrieving her hand.
“Oh really?” said Ivan.
and on in this vein for another page.
To this reader, it was a relief when Selin finally headed off to Europe for the summer, teaching English in Hungary. At least there was a change of scene. Of course, she will meet Ivan there and their semi-passive relationship dance will continue, but simply moving the locale and adding new characters (that Selin finds equally puzzling and describes with the same ironic detachment) added a spark of interest.
Do not expect to learn much about Eastern Europe from this novel: the book is written from Selin’s point of view, and and she views it through the same half-perplexed lens of her own confusion. But Hungary is geographically and historically closer to her Turkish roots than the US:
I had never heard of any Ottoman invasion of Hungary. AS a child, I had been told that the Turks and Hungarians were related, that the Huns were Turkic, that both peoples had migrated west from the Altai and spoke similar languages. I had an uncle Attila — it was a common Turkish name. But in Ivan’s world, our ancestors had been enemies.
In her last week, towards the end of the book, Selin makes a list of “potential uses of my time and opportunities”:
1. Learning Hungarian (How? Studying in this room, talking to Juli, trying to befriend the Gypsies?)
2. Having universal and meaningful human experiences (in English).
3. Understanding regional history (“Ottomans”, “communism”, “Habsburgs”).
4. Changing children’s lives? Some of them (Adam, maybe Csilla) do seem like they want their lives changed.
I stared at the list for a long time. The longer I stared, the less sense it made.
which pretty much encapsulates Selin’s coming-of-age: still incomplete, still with many questions, but also still identifiably Selin-esquely soul-searching and wryly analytical.
The title of this novel, of course, mirrors the Dostoevsky book. This probably has some metaphorical resonance for those who know and understand both books, but I am not among them.
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