The Idiot

The Idiot by Elif Batuman is some serious literary fiction. It is, like reality often is, at once mundane and confusing and meaningful and hilarious and absurd.

The story follows Selin, a freshman at Harvard, trying to figure out how to live. She ponders over what courses to take (the literature classes never discuss the things she considers to be actually important, like why something had to happen to someone, instead focusing on how the state of Europe affected the author’s writing), what it means to be a writer, and whether to live an ethical or aesthetic life. She winds up, among other things, sending cryptic e-mails back and forth with a fellow student from Russian class, spending a month teaching English in a Hungarian village, walking into a tree, and burying some strawberries in the dirt. It is wonderfully frivolous and insightful and bizarre, meticulously inspecting every nook and cranny of college life. This is complemented by Batuman’s great humour, which reminded me of a spider’s web — it is set up so well and delivered so dryly and matter-of-factly that you don’t see it coming until you walk straight into it.

Elif Batuman wrote an essay years ago in which she urged authors to “Write long novels, pointless novels.” And she has done just that, serving up something that is almost entirely pointless … which becomes the point, really. It is in direct defiance with the modern American novel and its emphasis on utility and conciseness, instead being something that is indulgently meandering. By avoiding the burden of having to have a point, the novel finds liberation in scrutinizing the little and big things along the way of life. The end result, therefore, is no less satisfying.