batuman the idiot — 1 kindle, 4B reads it too

batuman the idiot, the novel, was recommended to me by my mother, who has not read it either but trusts the title. she trusts a lot of titles. a fourth-floor neighbor reads the same book on a kindle in the elevator without acknowledging me.

desk, friday, 11:23am — phone at 23%, charger two and a half feet away on the cabinet, not plugged in, because moving things on a friday is a contract i will not sign before the weekend.

so. batuman the idiot. that’s the search i typed. that’s also the way mom phrased it on the sunday call last week, in the voice she uses when a paperback has just been on the radio. the title said idiot. the rest followed.

i would like to talk about the broader meaning of the word idiot, properly defined and credentialed — but only as a back door into the specific book, the one elif batuman published in 2017, the one mom mentioned, the one the 4B guy reads in the elevator without saying hello.

batuman the idiot: a 2017 novel by elif batuman about selin, a turkish-american freshman at harvard in the mid-1990s, who falls into an email correspondence with a hungarian math student named ivan and ends up teaching english to children in a hungarian village one summer. the title is borrowed from dostoyevsky’s 1869 idiot.

MOM. RECOMMENDED. A. BOOK. NEITHER. OF. US. HAS. READ.

1. batuman the idiot, the novel

the idiot by elif batuman, published 2017, four hundred-something pages, narrated in the first person by selin, a freshman at an unnamed but plainly harvard-shaped university in the mid-1990s. it was a finalist for the pulitzer, which is the literary equivalent of being told this is a serious matter, you will be quizzed on it later.

the plot, as i have it from a friend who actually read it: selin arrives at college, takes a russian class, encounters the early-1990s campus internet (a thing that worked over a phone line and made noises), and begins exchanging long emails with a graduate student named ivan, who commits to ambiguity at a scale most people commit to mortgages. she goes to hungary. she teaches english to children. very little, in the technical sense of plot, happens. very much, in every other sense, happens to her.

my copy is on the kitchen counter, on top of the unopened mail pile, with a receipt sticking out at page 41 acting as a structural bookmark.

2. the 1995 college email plot, briefly

the engine of the novel is email. that is the first interesting thing about batuman the idiot and the thing i suspect mom underrated when she recommended it. the emails are the relationship, and they are also, on every page, evidence of a relationship that has not, technically, started. it is the genre of correspondence where one person is putting in eight paragraphs and the other is replying with three lines that take, somehow, longer to write.

i recognise this. on a thursday in 2019 i wrote a paragraph to a person from a wedding, wrote a follow-up, deleted both, and went to bed. selin would have hit send. that is the difference between a literary protagonist and a man on his couch.

3. mom mentioned it on the sunday call

mom called this past sunday at 4:14pm, on the schedule mom and i have agreed to without ever discussing. she asked the standard infrastructure questions. then she said, i heard about a book on the radio. she always says this in the voice of a person delivering breaking news.

the book, she said, was the idiot, by — she paused, fished — that turkish woman, the one with the hair. that was, in mom’s filing system, elif batuman. mom has not read the book. mom has not, in the strict sense, read the radio segment about the book. she has heard a tone. tones are her primary medium. the tone said: you should mention this to your son, who is one. mothers know. it is their power. it cannot be defeated by a son who has, in fact, ordered the book within ninety seconds of the call ending.

she said, read it. tell me next sunday. by next sunday i will be on page 47, possibly. i will tell her i finished it. that will be a small, retroactive lie i will, in time, make true.

4. the 4B guy reads batuman the idiot in the elevator

on wednesday — recycling-truck day — i shared the elevator down with the_4b_guy. the_4b_guy is the neighbor who plays a small drum at hours that are technically legal but spiritually a war crime. we have a relationship structured entirely around the absence of relationship. we nod. we do not speak. that is the contract.

he was reading a kindle. i read, over his shoulder while pretending to study the certified-mail notice in my hand, the words: i wrote ivan a letter. that is, i’m fairly confident, a sentence from the idiot. neither of us said anything. the elevator opened on the lobby. he walked left, i walked right. we did not acknowledge that we were reading the same book.

his balcony, on the next floor up, has the kind of plastic chair that suggests a man who reads outside on saturdays. the small drum is, in some structural sense, his ivan: the thing he keeps almost-resolving. we have the contract. i will not raise it.

5. why selin sounds like a friend

selin, the narrator, is observant in the specific way that gets you nominated for a pulitzer and also, separately, gets you uninvited from a brunch. she watches herself misunderstand a graduate student for three hundred pages and never quite intervenes.

i recognise the posture. i sat down to write this draft at 11:23am intending a serious account of batuman the idiot, and instead have been re-reading in my head the page where selin notices that ivan has signed an email “yours, i.” and decides this is significant. she is right. it is. it is also the kind of detail you can spend a year on if nobody stops you.

6. dostoyevsky, the older brother of batuman the idiot

a brief detour: the title the idiot is not original to elif batuman. it is borrowed, openly, from fyodor dostoyevsky, who wrote his own idiot in 1869, about a russian aristocrat named prince myshkin who is good in a way the people around him cannot stop trying to ruin. one of the better adaptations is the 1958 soviet film of dostoyevsky’s idiot directed by ivan pyrev, which is, on its own, worth ten minutes if you are between meetings and the spreadsheet refuses to load.

for the cluster’s broader gallery, see my notes on complete idiots and the various species thereof. selin is, on no reading of the novel, a moron in the strict sense — and for the strict difference between an idiot and a moron in the technical and casual senses, there is a separate post written from the same desk on a different friday.

7. verdict, the book is correct, the title is honest

so. where does this leave batuman the idiot on a friday afternoon, with the phone now at 19% and the kettle at home doing whatever the kettle does when nobody is watching it.

the verdict is: the book is correct, the title is honest, the recommendation from mom is, against my expectations, accurate. i will read the novel — not on the schedule selin would approve of, but the way the 4B guy reads it: in stolen ten-minute pieces, in the elevator, on a kindle i don’t own, with the receipt at page 41 acting as a bookmark on a paperback i have not yet returned to.

the small notification on the corner of my screen, pulsing since 11:31am about a calendar event i did not accept, is the universe’s way of telling me selin would have, by now, written ivan four paragraphs and deleted three. the notification will be ignored. the novel will be read, slowly, on the strength of a tone.

phone at 19%. charger has not moved. receipt at page 41 has not moved. the 4B guy, at this hour, is presumably on the balcony with the kindle, getting more done than i am. fair.

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