elif the idiot — 1 thorough investigation

elif the idiot, on first-name terms, is how i think of her now, having spent zero hours with the actual book and many hours with the title. hank the ghost dog disagrees from the wall. mountain people, said the man at the bar, would have read the book by now.

i am writing this from the desk at 11:23, with the screen tilted away from the corridor. carla is upstairs in the annual planning meeting on the third floor, which i hear runs long when the slides have a chart nobody asked for. that gives me, give or take, the bulk of the late morning to argue with a novel i have not opened.

this is not a book review. this is an investigation into the title, the author, and the small confusion that happens when a noun you live with full-time turns up on someone else’s spine. the noun, in this case, is mine. the spine is hers. we are, on the cover at least, in a draw.

1. elif the idiot, the author and the title

elif batuman wrote a novel called “The Idiot” (2017), a coming-of-age story about a harvard freshman named selin who corresponds with a math student via email in 1995. that is the working description, assembled from blurbs, a podcast i half-listened to, and a friend of a friend who teaches comparative literature and uses the word “epistolary” like a knife.

i refer to her, in private, as elif the idiot, which is unfair, affectionate, and useful. unfair because she is a published novelist with serious credentials. affectionate because anyone who titles a book “the idiot” in 2017, knowing that a russian gentleman published a novel with that exact title in 1869, has either steel nerves or excellent taste in trouble. useful because i, the operator of this entire investigation into the word “idiot”, get to act like we are colleagues now.

we are not colleagues. she has the book. i have the website. she has selin. i have hank the ghost dog from 1B. we are, however, on the same shelf semantically.

2. the comparison table, batuman’s protagonist vs me

here is the chart you came here for. i drew it in a notebook with a leaking pen at the desk. it has been transcribed faithfully.

the table is not flattering to me. i am aware. that is the table working as intended. a comparison that flatters the writer is not a comparison, it is a press release.

3. hank from 1B as a third data point

hank the ghost dog lives in apartment 1B with a lady who travels too much. she leaves notes under my door with the spare key taped to them, the key dave once lost. on the wall, metaphorically and now also digitally, i keep what i call the wall of insults — a record of things people have said about me, audited weekly, scored on a small spreadsheet that nobody is paying me to maintain.

hank does not read elif batuman. hank does not read me. hank, when i sit on the floor with him for the contractually required walk, looks at the door like the door owes him money. that is the most idiot-coded behavior i have ever observed at close range. hank, in the comparison table above, would occupy a fourth column titled “honest about it.”

i’m fairly sure there is a study somewhere, possibly in a serious magazine, that says the dog watching the door is a more reliable narrator than the human watching the inbox. the study, if it exists, is held together with library tape and a citation i can’t reproduce. i stand by it anyway.

4. the wall of insults, freshly audited

the wall_insults_digital is the rebrand. used to be a corkboard with index cards that fell every time the heater clicked on. now it lives on a tab i don’t close, with timestamps and a column for “from a stranger” vs “from someone who knows my last name.” the audit this week, conducted at the desk while the meeting upstairs ran past noon, produced the following summary.

insults from strangers: up. insults from people who have met me in person: down, but with notes. insults that contain the word “idiot” used affectionately: holding steady. insults that contain the word “idiot” used to mean idiot: also holding steady, which is honest, which is the point.

the audit included one entry that referenced elif batuman, sent by a subscriber who found this site by typing the focus_kw into a search bar on a phone she did not trust. the entry read, more or less: “you are not the idiot, that is taken.” noted. logged as evidence. archived in the digital pile next to the unopened mail i keep meaning to triage.

5. mountain people are wrong about everything except cheese

“mountain people are wrong about everything except cheese.” that is the take, noted from a conversation at the bar with the man whose beard implied authority. he said it like a man who had tested it. i wrote it on a napkin, transferred it to the wall, and built a small religion around it before lunch.

elif batuman, to my knowledge, does not write about mountain people. selin does not get a chapter on the swiss. that is fine. a comparison does not require coverage of the same terrain, only the same noun. her noun is internal. mine is geographic. both can be wrong about almost everything, both can be right about a single specific thing — for her, it might be the cadence of a sentence; for me and the man at the bar, it is the cheese.

this is also where i pause to acknowledge that the wider family of words around moron and idiot contains a mountain of unhelpful synonyms, and the word moron in particular is the one i refuse to wear because it sounds like a brand of margarine. that paragraph was a cross-cluster nod, noted. the moron file lives next door, behind a sign i wrote myself.

6. the desk where i drew this up

the desk has, this morning, accumulated: a cooling cup, a pen with a leak that is probably my fault, the leaking pen’s understudy, the pad with the comparison table, and the seventh microwave’s warranty card, which i found in a drawer i did not remember owning. the seventh microwave is still functional, which is information i submit noted-keeping.

i did the research. the research is me, looking at things. specifically: at her wikipedia-adjacent author bio (skimmed without endorsement, no link), at her interview transcripts (read with one eye), at the spine of a copy of her book that lives on the shelf at the bookstore i pass on the way to the bar with mike. mike, who has a system for his taxes and has not filed since 2019, listened to me describe this comparison and said: “is this an investigation or are you just typing.” both, i said. both is a category.

7. verdict, the comparison favors no one, also that’s fine

the verdict is that the comparison favors no one, which is the only verdict a comparison between an author and a website operator can honestly produce. she is a novelist. i am a man with a domain name and a microwave count. selin, on the page, is loved. hank, behind the door, is fed on schedule. i, at the desk, am within the rest of the morning of finishing this post and also this cup, which has gone cold in protest.

elif the idiot, in this writer’s working file, will keep that nickname. it is a sign of respect that survives the fact that i won’t be reading the book this quarter. mountain people, when i next see them, will be invited to the cheese conversation and barred from the rest. hank, when the lady from 1B comes home, will be returned in roughly the condition i borrowed him in.

that is the chart, the comparison, the verdict, and the audit. one shared noun, three data points, one wall, one cheese exemption, one microwave still standing. i submit it for review, which is overstating it. i submit it noted.

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