the book the idiot — 1 fairly sure investigation

the book the idiot, said in the wrong order, was the thing dave called about in the small hours while laughing for nine consecutive minutes. coffee, by then, had become an achievement, the microwave watched, and the queue of dead appliances is a respected member of the household now.

tuesday morning. desk on the third floor, screen tilted, the seventh microwave is, technically, in the kitchen at home where i left it humming, and the phone, sitting on 23% battery from a charge it received an hour ago, is doing the slow drift that 23% always does. carla is upstairs at the q3 review. i have, optimistically, the rest of the morning before she comes back with a folder.

so. the book the idiot. that is the phrase i want on the table. not the idiot book, which is what most people type into the search bar. not idiot, the, which is what a librarian would write on a shelf tag. the book the idiot — with the article, the noun, and then the title — is the construction i would like to defend, slowly, like a man defending a parking spot he is not legally entitled to.

writing this from the desk on the third floor, screen low, with carla still upstairs in the q3 review. the rest of the morning is, on paper, mine.

the book the idiot, the article placement

the phrase has three words. the. book. the. two articles. one noun in the middle. it is, as a sentence, a small architectural achievement. you have your subject. you have your specifier. you have a second specifier, which is the title of the work, which has its own article baked into it because the work is called the idiot and not, for example, idiot with no garnish. the structure is recursive. it stutters in a polite way. it reads, on a screen, like someone who is about to make a point and is taking a moment to find the point.

which, frankly, is what reading the larger investigation into what an idiot actually is tends to feel like. you start with a word. you end with a sentence about a russian prince and a harvard freshman and a man at a desk at 10:38 in the morning trying to explain why the book the idiot is grammatically more correct than its alternatives. that is not a journey i recommend. it is, however, the journey i am on.

two novels share the title. both are called the idiot. both are, in their way, about a person who arrives at the wrong conclusion through a confident process. one of them was written in 1869 by a russian who lost a great deal at cards and used the proceeds, or the lack of them, to write fiction. the other was written in 2017 by a writer who covered, in four hundred pages, a freshman year that most of us can’t remember without a beer.

why the matters here, briefly

the article, the little word the, does work people don’t credit it for. it specifies. it points. it picks one out of many. a book is a book. the book is the book you and i both already know about, which is the trick. the moment i say the book the idiot you are supposed to do a small calculation: which idiot, which book, which one of the two does he mean.

most of the time the answer is dostoevsky. he came first. he is, as people who studied russian at university like to remind you, the original. prince myshkin is the original idiot in the sense the word now most commonly means: a person too good for the world, too earnest for the people around him, too willing to believe what he is told.

but sometimes the answer is batuman. selin, the freshman at harvard, is an idiot in the more familiar sense — the one i, at this desk, recognize. she sends emails. she crosses an ocean for a man who has not exactly invited her. she keeps doing the next slightly wrong thing because the next slightly wrong thing is the only thing on offer. that’s the same idiot you find in odia translation, by the way, and probably in twelve other languages where the word travels with its full backpack of meaning.

so when someone says the book the idiot, the article does the heavy lifting. it asks you to commit to one. you can stall. you can ask which one. you can refuse to choose, which is, by my count, the third option and the one i prefer.

the 2 am revelation about title grammar

at 2 am — and i mean this, on a wednesday, with a third coffee i had not technically earned — i had a revelation about title grammar. the revelation was this: english titles with the in front of them are, structurally, a complete sentence with the verb removed. the great gatsby. the old man and the sea. the catcher in the rye. the idiot. each one is, if you squint, a noun phrase doing the work of a whole declarative. this is the idiot. behold, the idiot. here, the idiot, in repose.

i wrote this down on a piece of paper next to the kitchen sink. the paper, in the morning, said title = sentence minus verb. i could not at the time remember what i had been driving at. now i can. the title is the noun the sentence is built around. the verb is implied. the verb is something like look or see or here is. you, the reader, supply the verb. the writer supplies the noun. that is the contract.

which is why, when you say the book the idiot, you are doing something slightly different. you are introducing the contract. you are saying: here is a title. here, separately, is the noun describing the format the title comes in. here, in case you missed it, is a small frame around the small frame. it is, on reflection, a way of speaking that belongs to people who are slightly nervous about being understood. i am one. it suits me.

dave called and laughed for nine minutes about the post

dave, who keeps the napkin with the count of dead microwaves in his glove compartment, called. it was 11:14 at night. i had told him i was working on a post about the title the idiot and the importance of the article. dave laughed. dave laughed, by my own personal stopwatch, for nine straight minutes. i timed it. i timed it because i have learned, over four years of being friends with dave, that a nine-minute laugh is a piece of evidence about the post i am writing, and i prefer evidence to feedback.

dave said: so the post is about the word “the”. i said: partly. dave said: the post is about the word “the”. i said: also about a russian novel. dave said: the post is about the word “the”. dave repeats himself when he wants to be on record. dave then asked if i was going to file it under the unopened mail pile of posts nobody reads, by which dave meant the longtail section of the site. i said it was an investigation. dave laughed again, but this time only for two minutes. progress.

this is the part where, in another era, i would have recorded the call and made it into a podcast. instead, i wrote it down. recording is a project. writing it down is a tuesday. dave does not know he was an interview. that’s a choice i made. it has been good for me.

coffee is achievement, allegedly relevant

now, let me say this plainly. “coffee is achievement”. that is one of the hot takes i have on file, and i would like to defend it, in this post, because it is, in fact, relevant. you cannot read the idiot, either of them, without coffee. you cannot defend a sentence like the book the idiot without coffee. you cannot, in my view, get from a 2 am revelation about title grammar to a 3:18pm post about it without coffee acting as the bridge between the two events.

coffee, in this household, is a chain of small achievements. the first cup is a confirmation that the morning has started. the second cup is the cup that does the writing. the third cup, which i had at 2 am, is the cup that produced the revelation about title grammar, which means it is, retroactively, the cup that produced this entire post. without it, there is no post. with it, there is this. you decide whether that is a recommendation or a warning.

tea, by way of contrast, is wet leaves. i am not going to defend that part today. the cited take is the relevant one. coffee is the engine. the engine is what brought us here. i rest my case, briefly.

the case for the article

the case for keeping the article, when you talk about either book, is short. without it, you have idiot, which is a noun without a context. with it, you have the idiot, which is a person. you have specified the idiot. you have made the idiot real. the article is what does the conjuring.

more than that, the article is what makes the title generous. the idiot is not an idiot. an idiot is anyone. the idiot is, specifically, the one we are about to read about. the one with the name. the one with the room. the one with the friends, the journey, the misunderstandings. the article is the door to the room. without it, you are standing in the hallway, looking at a sign that just says idiot, with no idea where to put your coat.

this is also true of the post you are reading. without the article, this post would be called book idiot investigation, which sounds like a piece of corporate paperwork. with the article, it is called the book the idiot, which sounds like a person at a desk trying, slowly, to make a point about a russian novel and a harvard novel and a phone at 23% battery. that is the genre. the article is what makes it a genre.

for what it’s worth, the 1951 kurosawa adaptation, called hakuchi, which is the japanese version of the dostoevsky idiot story, also keeps the article, in its way. hakuchi in japanese means, roughly, the idiot. the title is intact across the language jump. that is, by my count, a vote for the article. the article travels.

verdict, the article is required, also charming

the verdict is the article stays. the book the idiot, with both articles, is the construction i recommend for any conversation about either novel. it is, on the page, a small stutter. it is, in the mouth, a small ritual. it is, in the search bar, more specific than its alternatives. it does the thing the article was invented to do.

i am not saying you have to read either book. i have read one. selin’s book i bought in 2019 and have, by my own admission, not opened. dostoevsky’s i read in college, badly, with a highlighter and a strong opinion i have since revised. neither of those reading experiences qualifies me to discuss the books in detail, which is why this post is about the title. the title is the part i can defend without doing additional homework.

and the title, with its little article, is — i’ll say it — charming. it lowers the temperature. it makes the noun gentler. idiot alone is an accusation. the idiot is a description. that is a meaningful demotion of severity, and the article does it for free, without asking anyone for permission.

carla just rounded the corner. she had a small folder. she did not look at the screen. that, in this office, counts as approval.