The Idiot

Starred review from January 2, 2017
The mysterious relationship between language and the world” is just one of the questions troubling Selin Karada˘g, the 18-year-old protagonist of Batuman’s (The Possessed) wonderful first novel, a bildungsroman Selin narrates with fluent wit and inexorable intelligence. Beginning her first year at Harvard in the fall of 1995, Selin is determined to “be a courageous person, uncowed by other people’s dumb opinions”; she already thinks of herself as a writer, although “this conviction was completely independent of having ever written anything.” In a Russian class, the Turkish-American Selin is befriended by the worldlier Svetlana, whose Serbian family has endowed her with capital and complexes, and the older Hungarian math major Ivan, who becomes Selin’s correspondent in an exciting new medium: email. Their late-night exchanges inspire Selin more than anything else in her life, but they frustrate her, too: Ivan’s intentions toward her are vague, perhaps even to himself. Traveling to Paris with Svetlana in the summer of 1996, Selin plans to continue on to Hungary, where she will teach English in a village school, and then to Turkey, where her extended family resides. Thus Batuman updates the grand tour travelogue just as she does the epistolary novel and the novel of ideas, in prose as deceptively light as it is ambitious. One character wonders whether it’s possible “to be sincere without sounding pretentious,” and this long-awaited and engrossing novel delivers a resounding yes.

Starred review from December 15, 2016
A sweetly caustic first novel from a writer whose work has appeared in the New Yorker, the Paris Review, and n+1. It's fall 1995, and Selin is just starting her first year at Harvard. One of the first things she learns upon arriving at her new school is that she has an email account. Her address contains her last name, "Karada?, but all lowercase, and without the Turkish ?, which was silent." When presented with an Ethernet cable, she asks "What do we do with this, hang ourselves?" All of this occurs on the first page of Batuman's (The Possessed: Adventures With Russian Books and the People Who Read Them, 2011) debut novel, and it tells us just about everything we need to know about the author's thematic concerns and style. Selin's closest friends at Harvard are Ralph, a ridiculously handsome young man with a Kennedy fetish, and Svetlana, a Serbian from Connecticut. Selin's first romantic entanglement--which begins via electronic mail--is with Ivan, a Hungarian mathematician she meets in Russian class. Selin studies linguistics and literature, teaches ESL, and spends a lot of time thinking about what language--and languages--can and cannot do. This isn't just bloodless philosophizing, though. Selin is, among other things, a young woman trying to figure out the same things young people are always trying to figure out. And, as it happens, Selin is delightful company. She's smart enough to know the ways in which she is dumb, and her off-kilter relationship to the world around her is revelatory and, often, mordantly hilarious. For example, this is how she describes a particular linguistics class: "we learned about people who had lost the ability to combine morphemes, after having their brains perforated by iron poles. Apparently there were several such people, who got iron poles stuck in their heads and lived to tell the tale--albeit without morphemes." Some readers may get impatient with the slow pace of the narrative, which feels more like a collection of connected microfictions than a traditional novel, but readers who are willing to travel with Selin at her own contemplative pace will be grateful that they did. Self-aware, cerebral, and delightful.

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October 1, 2016

As evidenced by her National Book Critics Circle finalist, The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them, Batuman is a refreshingly different breed of critic, offering intriguingly personal and at-a-slant takes showing what the books she reads mean in her life (and maybe yours). Her tartly told first novel examines what happens to Selin, the daughter of Turkish immigrants, when she lands at Harvard in 1995 and gradually reimagines herself through first love and an equally important new passion, writing.

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

December 1, 2016

In this semiautobiographical debut novel, New Yorker writer and National Book Critics Circle finalist Batuman delightfully captures the hyperstimulation and absurdity of the first-year university experience. The story is set in the early 1990s, when Selin, a first-generation Turkish American girl from New Jersey, is introduced simultaneously to both email and Harvard. In Russian 101, she makes friends with Svetlana, a worldly Serbian emigre, and falls for handsome Hungarian upperclassman Ivan. Ivan's affection is elusive--he already has a girlfriend--and their relationship consists primarily of a plaintive yet intellectual email correspondence while Ivan travels about exploring graduate schools. To see Ivan over the summer, Selin commits to teaching English in Hungary. The unfamiliar language gives rise to a succession of seemingly random but mild misadventures. Despite its allusive title, this work is more modern fiction than Russian novel. The narrative is highly detailed and determinedly linear (compare Karl Ove Knausgaard or Ben Lerner), while the voice is lighthearted and wry, with occasional laugh-out-loud zingers. VERDICT Most readers will enjoy. [See Prepub Alert, 9/12/16.]--Reba Leiding, emeritus, James Madison Univ. Lib., Harrisonburg, VA

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.