novel the idiot — 1 thorough investigation

novel the idiot is the kind of phrase you type into a search bar when you are building, in your head, a fictional bookshelf, and i am building one. mountain people, again, would understand, and brenda the neighbor’s plant continues to die in the kitchen on her own schedule.

the shelf, for now, lives next to the seventh microwave, which is currently the only working appliance in the kitchen with verified opinions. on the shelf, in my head, are roughly four titles. on the shelf, in real life, are zero titles, because the shelf is, technically, a stack of unopened mail and a coaster shaped like a fish.

writing this on the clock, second cup, screen tilted slightly away from the door. carla is at a training upstairs about a software the company bought and nobody understands. roughly fifty minutes of runway.

so. novel the idiot, as a search query, is a small mystery. you type those four words and you get, in no particular order, dostoevsky from 1869, batuman from 2017, and a few other minor idiots i’m not yet ready to discuss. the phrase, by leading with the word novel, is doing something subtle. it is asking: which one. it is also asking, in a quieter voice: are there others.

FOUR WORDS. TWO BOOKS. AT LEAST. POSSIBLY MORE.

novel the idiot, what fits the shelf

the rule for the shelf, which i invented this morning, is simple. a book qualifies if its title is, or contains, the word idiot, and if the book is a novel, by which i mean a thing with a plot and pages and a person on the cover looking sideways at something. nonfiction is welcome on a different shelf. memoirs are welcome on a third shelf, near the unopened mail pile, where they belong.

by that rule, the shelf has, so far:

• dostoevsky’s the idiot. 1869. russian. long. fatal. has a prince in it.
• elif batuman’s the idiot from 2017. american-by-way-of-turkey. shorter. funnier. has email in it.
• some lesser-known idiots, including a 1951 french title and a few small-press novels i found by typing novel the idiot into the same search bar everybody else uses, with the same results.

three to four books. that is, by my standards, a complete collection. some people own three thousand books. those people, i suspect, have a relationship with shelving that i do not. i own approximately twelve, four of which are cookbooks, two of which are about the wine my friend stefan keeps insisting i should learn. stefan, when i mentioned the idiot bookshelf project, said it was “a fine project”. stefan says everything is fine. when stefan says fine, the project is, somewhere, a small triumph.

the russian one, the american one, the turkish-american one

the russian one is dostoevsky. that one i have, in physical form, on the shelf next to the toaster, where i moved it in 2021 because i thought the kitchen would shame me into reading it. the kitchen has not. dostoevsky’s idiot is prince myshkin, who is, by every account, too good for the world he is in. he gets sick. he loves people he should not love. he says clarifying things at the wrong moments. it is, allegedly, one of the great novels.

the american one is batuman, which is to say the turkish-american one, because selin, the narrator, is from new jersey by way of istanbul, and the book is, in part, about being a person whose head holds two languages and one bad email habit. selin is a freshman at harvard in 1995. she takes a russian class. she falls for a hungarian math student named ivan. she writes long emails. nothing, by which i mean nothing, is resolved. that, i would argue, is the most accurate plot description ever written.

the third idiot, the one whose name i cannot quite recall, is a 1950s french novel, possibly belgian, possibly a translation that someone titled the idiot in english because nobody knew what else to call it. i looked it up. i lost the tab. the tab is, by my count, somewhere between 47 tabs and 49 tabs, depending on whether you count the two i opened by accident this morning.

three idiots. one shelf. zero pages turned, this year, by me. the shelf is, in this sense, aspirational. aspirational is a word i picked up from a colleague who left the company in 2022. the colleague was, in retrospect, also one. it takes one to know one, and even then, only sometimes.

the hot takes the protagonists would have, hypothetically

now we drift into speculation, which is my favorite literary mode, because it requires nothing from me except confidence. i would like to imagine, for one paragraph each, what hot takes the protagonists of these novels would hold, if pressed, on a topic i, also, hold a hot take on. the topic is mountain people.

i hold the take that mountain people are wrong about everything except cheese. i did not invent this take. it came to me, fully formed, on a tuesday two years ago, after a colleague returned from a “mountain retreat” with a story about something called a “sound bath” and a pair of socks that cost forty dollars. i wrote the take down on a napkin. the napkin is somewhere. my friend dave keeps the list. dave laughed for nine straight minutes the first time i read it to him. i timed it.

so. prince myshkin, dostoevsky’s idiot, on mountain people: he would, i suspect, decline to take a side. he would say something soft and sad about the dignity of all peoples and then ask if anyone needed water. he would mean it. he would also be right, but in a way that doesn’t help anyone.

selin, batuman’s idiot, on mountain people: she would write a long email about mountain people to ivan, the hungarian math student, and ivan would not reply for eleven days, and then he would reply with a one-line email in which he says something like “i find the question of mountains the same as the question of language”, and selin would feel, briefly, like they were communicating, and then she would re-read the email and feel, more accurately, like they were not.

the third idiot, whose name i can’t recall, on mountain people: i don’t know. that’s the joke. the third idiot was published before i was born, in a country i have not visited, by an author whose name i would have to look up, which i won’t, because the rest of the morning is finite.

three idiots. three takes. all roughly correct. none of them as direct as mine. mine is on a napkin. mine is in dave’s wallet. mine, in a sense, has more reach.

brenda the dead plant on shelf duty

brenda the dead plant sits on the kitchen counter, two feet from the proposed bookshelf, doing the work of looking decorative without being alive. brenda has been dead since, by my best estimate, late 2023. she was a gift from a coworker who has since left the company. i kept brenda because, at the time, i thought watering her would teach me something about responsibility. brenda taught me, instead, that some things look the same alive and dead, and that the distinction, on a kitchen counter at 10:47am, is mostly philosophical.

brenda would, in a fair world, be on the bookshelf in lieu of a third novel. she has the right shape. she does not require new content. she is not, technically, going to outlive me, but she is also not going to die again, which, by some literary measures, is a kind of immortality.

the third yoga mat, for the record, is still under the sofa from 2023, where it lives. i mention it because the yoga mat and brenda the dead plant are, in my apartment, doing the same job — being a thing i bought with intent, and that has now become a thing i live with. one is decorative. the other is, in theory, exercise. neither serves its original function. both have my respect.

mountain people, allegedly relevant

the mountain people take is allegedly relevant because, and i’m aware this is a stretch, both novel-the-idiot books contain people who go somewhere and come back changed by it. selin goes to hungary. myshkin goes to russia. neither place is, in the strict sense, a mountain. but both are elevated states, and that, i would argue, is close enough.

my own elevated state is the kitchen counter at 10:47am with the seventh microwave behind me, brenda dead in front of me, and a search bar open with the words novel the idiot typed into it. i have not gone anywhere this year. i have not come back changed. but i have, by my own count, had three small revelations at this counter, two of which i can no longer remember and one of which is on a post-it that has, since then, fallen behind the fridge.

the case for a small bookshelf with a clear theme

i would like to make the case, briefly, for a small bookshelf with a clear theme, because i think it is the only honest way to own books. most people’s bookshelves are a graveyard of intentions. they have the marathon book, the meditation book, the financial freedom book — bought in different years by different versions of the person, and now standing together in mute disagreement.

my proposal is the opposite. one shelf. one theme. one word, ideally, in the title. the idiot shelf, in my kitchen, has a clear thesis. it is: here are several books, by several authors, in several centuries, all of whom thought the word “idiot” was the right word for the title. that thesis tells you something. it tells you that for one hundred and fifty-six years, smart people have been reaching for that word. it tells you that the word is, possibly, the most useful word in the language, because it covers everything from a russian prince to a harvard freshman to a thirty-something at a desk on a tuesday in may, looking at a dead plant.

i do own a small standing desk on which i sit, but the bookshelf is not on it. the bookshelf is on the kitchen counter. the kitchen counter is where ideas happen, partly because the kitchen is also where the microwave lives, and the microwave is, in my house, the device that has produced the most narrative content per square foot of any object i own, including the dishwasher, which is a cabinet that judges you, but quietly.

verdict, the shelf is honest, also short

the verdict is that the shelf, even though it is mostly imaginary, is the most honest piece of furniture in my apartment. it is short. it is themed. it is, technically, real, in the sense that brenda is on it, and brenda exists, even if she no longer photosynthesizes. the books are coming. some of them are coming from the bedside table, where they have been since 2019, doing the work of holding a half-glass of water.

i have not read any of them. i still feel qualified, by name alone, to curate the shelf. that is, in itself, the most idiot move possible. i’m doing it anyway.

(if you want to see the idiot as it has been adapted on screen — the russian one, that is — there is a 1958 soviet adaptation of dostoevsky, and the 1958 soviet film of dostoevsky’s the idiot has, by my count, the most beautiful sad faces ever assembled in one production. five minutes of it is a better afternoon than most.)

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