the idiot a novel — 1 investigation

on the spine of the paperback under my left elbow, in a font two points smaller than the title, the publisher has written the words a novel. this is, presumably, a clarification. someone, somewhere, was worried a person might pick up a book called the idiot and assume it was a self-help guide. the publisher disagreed. the publisher won. the words sit there, doing their honest little job.

this morning the snooze added nine minutes to the clock for the seventh time, which is approximately one nine-minute lap per microwave i have killed, if you are tracking that kind of math, which i am, intermittently, on the back of an envelope i probably shouldn’t open. the seventh microwave, since you ask, refuses to spin the plate this week. neither situation is the novel’s fault. the synchronicity, however, is the reason this post exists.

writing this from the desk. carla is in q3 prep two floors up, where slides are being aligned for a meeting i am, on paper, in. the rest of the morning is, on paper, mine.

desk, second coffee, the one that does the actual work. paperback by my left elbow. my running guide to the word idiot is in the tab i never close, which is the tab i pretend to read instead of working.

the idiot a novel, the genre tag

here is the thing about a book whose title is a single accusatory noun. the publisher gets nervous. the publisher imagines a reader, a real one, walking into a bookstore, picking up the volume, and assuming it is a memoir, an instruction manual, or a confession. so the publisher reaches for a small phrase to insert under the title. a novel. two words. one job. the job is: do not return this book, you knew what you were buying.

i bought my copy in, by the receipt still wedged at page forty-seven, late november. the year is illegible because the receipt has been folded against the page for long enough that the ink has done its slow migration into the paper, the way unopened mail does when you leave it long enough on a counter. the receipt is now part of the book. the book is, at this point, slightly bigger than the publisher intended, by the thickness of one folded receipt.

the bookstore, also, put a small round sticker on the lower left corner of the front cover. staff pick, it says, in a font designed to look handwritten by a person with strong opinions and time on their hands. i have not peeled the sticker off. i have, in four years, considered peeling the sticker off, and decided each time that the sticker is now part of the book.

why books say a novel under the title

i looked it up. of course i looked it up. it is what i do at the desk while carla is upstairs and i am, in theory, preparing my own slides for a meeting i will attend by being physically in the room. the words a novel on a cover are a genre tag, an industry convention, a small flag for the bookseller and the algorithm. they say: this is fiction. shelve accordingly. categorize accordingly. do not, under any circumstances, file it next to the cookbooks.

this matters more than it should, because of dostoevsky, who wrote the idiot in 1869, and elif batuman, who wrote the idiot in 2017, and several other people who have written books titled the idiot in between. all of them are novels. all of them carry, in some edition, the small subtitle. a novel. a novel. a novel. it is a chorus, sung quietly by publishers, to nervous shoppers, in fonts smaller than the main event.

the alternative would be to assume the reader can figure it out from context. the reader, in my experience, cannot. i am the reader. i have, on several occasions, picked up a book and not known, until page sixty, what kind of book it was. i appreciate the warning. i appreciate the small phrase. i appreciate, in general, anyone willing to clarify what i am holding before i hold it for too long.

if you are interested in seeing the same source title travel into other formats, the russian television production from 2003 covers the idiot across ten episodes of slow rooms and longer sentences, and is documented here for the curious — the 2003 russian idiot tv adaptation. ten episodes. one prince. a great many staircases. it is, i am told, very good. i have not seen it. i have, however, watched the trailer twice on an evening when the bedside lamp was the only light in the room.

mom called sunday and asked if it was true

my mom called on sunday, at the hour she calls every sunday, which is a hour designed by my mother to land precisely between when i have finished pretending to be productive and when i have started pretending to be relaxed. she has done this for years. she does not vary. there is a study somewhere, probably in a serious magazine, about how mothers calibrate the unhappiest hour of a week with surgical precision. i’m fairly sure of it.

“are you reading,” she said. she did not say anything after the verb. it was, the way she said it, both a question and an accusation. mothers know. it’s their power. it cannot be defeated.

i looked at the paperback, which was on the side of the sofa where i have been not-reading it for several months, with the receipt still at page forty-seven, the sticker still on the cover, and the spine showing exactly the same crease line it had in november of the year-illegible.

“yes,” i said. “i’m reading the idiot. it’s a novel.”

my mom paused. the pause was, in its own way, the entire phone call. then she said the thing she says every sunday, which is some variation on “okay sweetie”, and asked about the apartment, and we talked, briefly, about a cousin’s wedding i will not attend, and we hung up, and i have not opened the book since. that is what reading a book about an idiot, by an idiot, mostly looks like.

the desk, the 9-min snooze, the morning that started this

this morning at 6:47am the snooze added nine minutes to the clock, as it does. the snooze is set to nine minutes. i did not set it to nine minutes. it came that way. apparently nine minutes is the official duration of denial, as decided by a committee at an alarm clock company in 1956, and nobody has had the nerve to overturn the decision since. nine minutes is, by my count, exactly the time it takes to convince yourself you are not going to be late, before noticing that you are.

at 6:56am, the snooze went again. at 7:05am, the snooze went a third time. by the time i was vertical it was 7:14am, and the kitchen was waiting, and the seventh microwave was waiting, and the paperback on the side of the sofa was, itself, also waiting, in the patient way that books wait when they have given up on being read.

i thought, while warming a cup of coffee in the seventh microwave, which heats coffee perfectly well despite the plate refusing to spin: i should write something about a novel today. and then i thought: i have been not-reading the idiot for long enough that i could, plausibly, write the not-reading. that is the post you are reading. it began, like most of my decisions, on the third snooze of a tuesday.

the microwave plate doesn’t need to spin, briefly

i mention this only because the paperback by my left elbow has a similar problem. the spine, also, does not move. the spine has not moved in months. the receipt at page forty-seven is, in this metaphor, the food, which is warm whether or not the spine cracks open. the analogy holds. the analogy is, in fact, the only useful thing i have done this morning.

the case for genre tags on covers

let me say something clearly about the small phrase under the title. some people, mostly the kind of people who own a great many tote bags from independent bookstores, will tell you that the phrase a novel is condescending. they will say: of course it is a novel, look at it, you can tell, the cover has a person on it looking sad. those people are wrong. those people, i suspect, have never bought a book they did not finish.

i have bought several. the unopened mail pile on the kitchen counter is, in its own way, a small library of intentions. the bedside table holds three books with bookmarks at page forty-seven, page sixty-three, and page nineteen. the elif batuman novel, which i wrote a separate post about, is on a different shelf entirely, with its own receipt at its own approximate page. each of those books, helpfully, says a novel on the cover. each of them, helpfully, lets me know what i am failing to read.

this is service, frankly. the publisher could have left the title alone and let the reader sort it out. the publisher chose, instead, to be kind. the publisher chose to err on the side of clarity. the publisher chose, in a small way, to give the idiot a fighting chance. my notes on a different idiot, batuman’s, that i also have not finished live in the same general drawer of literary procrastination. they are filed under “intent”. they will, i’m told, age well.

verdict, the tag is honest, also redundant

so here is where we land. the words a novel under the title the idiot are a genre tag, a publisher’s friendly clarification, a small flag for the algorithm, a tiny act of customer service performed in two-point font. they are honest. they are also, in the case of this particular title, slightly redundant, because the word idiot already does most of the work. you know what kind of book it is. you know what kind of person it is about. you know, with some unease, that the person it is about is, possibly, you.

i have not read past page forty-seven. i may not read past page forty-seven. the receipt may stay where it is, the sticker may stay where it is, the spine may stay where it is, and the small phrase under the title may continue to do its small honest job. the book will be, by my count, a novel. i will be, by everyone else’s count, the demographic it warned about. in another language, in another script, the same word is doing the same job, which is its own consolation, of a kind.

carla just walked past with a folder. small nod. she did not look at the screen. screens, on this floor, are protected by the social contract that says nobody actually reads them.

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