She points to a picture of some furniture. Not only must you understand someone else, you have to be something specific and convincing yourself – all at the same time! When Selin visits the Louvre, her friend asks which portrait she most identifies with. But communication with people, at least for Selin, is painful and fraught. Objects are comprehensible - they don't talk back. many of the people in the book remain flat, while inanimate objects take on golden, gorgeous warmth. When Ivan goes home to Hungary for the summer, she follows, signing up to teach English in a Hungarian village. The Internet is new, and Selin uses her cord to begin an email correspondence with Ivan, the designated 'love interest' of her story. 'What do we do with this, hang ourselves?' Selin asks, presented with an Ethernet cable on her first day at Harvard. 'You could get the meaning, or you could miss it completely.' The Idiot may not have a point, or a definite meaning that can be extracted and spirited away like the prize in a cereal box, but it is full of subtle, playful insight on communication, language, and the painful process of choosing an identity without falling into scripted roles. Selin, in contrast, enters her freshman year at Harvard thinking it is possible to know what books really mean. The Idiot is a long wander, a vague rummage, 'as simultaneously absorbing and off-putting as someone else's incredibly long dream,' as her narrator, Selin, says of Bleak House. 'Write long novels, pointless novels,' she urges in an essay for n+1. How?Įlif Batuman is on record as disliking 'crisp' fiction, fiction that streamlines, that asks to be compared to apples, or whips.

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