the idiot — the elif batuman one, which i have not read

there is a novel called the idiot by elif batuman. i have not read it. i feel a kinship with it anyway, because the title alone covers more of my situation than any book i have actually finished, which is currently zero books this year.

desk, second coffee — the one that does the heavy lifting. carla is upstairs at the budget review. the rest of the morning is, on paper, mine.

so. the idiot, by elif batuman. published 2017. a finalist for the pulitzer, which i looked up on a tab i opened three months ago and never closed. it is, by every account, a serious literary novel by a serious literary person. it is also, for reasons we will get to, a book i have not read.

i would like to address that last point first, because i can already hear someone, somewhere — possibly stefan, who we’ll get to — saying that i am not qualified to write about a book i have not read. to which i say: and yet here we are. the book is called the idiot. i am one. by sheer name recognition, i have a stake in this. the publisher should send me a copy. for legal reasons.

the idiot by elif batuman: a 2017 novel about a freshman at harvard in the mid-1990s navigating language, email, and a confusing crush. narrated by selin, a turkish-american student. the title comes from dostoevsky, who wrote a book of the same name about a different idiot. mine is a third idiot, unaffiliated.

I HAVE NOT READ IT. I FEEL ENTITLED TO IT.

what the elif batuman novel is, after a quick search

the search happened. i had, at the time, forty-seven tabs open, and one of them was the wikipedia page about the novel, opened during what i now remember was a 2 am revelation about whether i could legitimately be a literary critic without doing any of the reading. the answer, i decided at 11:23am, was yes. i wrote it down on a notepad. the notepad is somewhere in the apartment. i’ll find it eventually.

the book is about selin, a freshman at harvard in the mid-1990s. she is studying linguistics. she takes a russian class. she develops a crush on a math student named ivan, who is older, hungarian, and emotionally evasive. they exchange long emails. she goes to hungary in the summer to teach english to children, mostly because of him. that’s the plot, as far as i have it.

the title is borrowed, openly, from dostoevsky, who wrote his idiot in 1869. it is a longer book, with more death in it. batuman’s idiot has, instead, more email. that, i would argue, is a fair trade.

what i can confirm without having read it

i can confirm the following, with some confidence, even without having opened the book.

one: the novel is widely praised. several people whose opinions matter, and several people whose opinions don’t but who post a lot, have called it funny, smart, and observant. these are three words that mean it is the kind of book i would, in theory, like very much. in practice, i bought a copy in 2019, put it on my bedside table, and now use the bedside table mainly to hold a half-glass of water and an unopened envelope from someone i would prefer not to think about.

two: the book is long. four hundred pages is not, by literary standards, long. four hundred pages is, by my standards, an investment of psychological capital that i have, this year, allocated entirely to figuring out why my dishwasher has stopped working when it is, by all evidence, a cabinet that judges me.

three: the title is correct. batuman, without my permission, has captured something i have spent my adult life trying to articulate.

the title as accurate description of my life

i would now like to argue, briefly, that the title the idiot is — and i mean this sincerely — the most useful four-word phrase ever applied to my own life. the idiot. that’s me. that’s what i am.

i have not read the book. but i can imagine a version of it in which the protagonist, instead of being a freshman at harvard, is a thirty-something at a desk on the second floor of an unnamed building, writing emails to nobody in particular, and ending the day by lying on the floor of an apartment because the bed felt, that day, like too much furniture. that’s the book i would have written. batuman wrote her own, which is, i’m told, better than mine would have been. fair. there’s a quiet confirmation bias at work in this whole exercise — i decided the title described me before i ever opened the book, and i have, since then, only encountered information that supports the decision.

but the title. the title is mine. i am claiming it, retroactively, as a description of myself. if anyone wants to dispute this, they can write to my publisher. i do not have a publisher. that is, also, the joke.

what i imagine happens in the book

i would like to attempt, here, a summary of a book i have not read, based purely on context clues and the back-cover blurb. this is, i acknowledge, not literary criticism. it is closer to literary speculation.

• selin arrives at harvard. she does not know what she’s doing. neither does anyone else. she is, however, the only one being honest about it.
• she takes a russian class. she does not learn russian. she does develop strong opinions about russian literature, which is, i’m told, the actual point.
• she meets ivan. ivan is the kind of person who would say “the question of meaning is itself the meaning” and then leave the room. she falls for this. i would too.
• they exchange emails. the emails get longer. nothing, by which i mean nothing, is resolved.
• she goes to hungary. she teaches english to children. the children are smarter than her in ways she cannot fully articulate.

that, in my speculation, is the novel. if i have it wrong, i have it wrong. if i have it right, i would like a small acknowledgment from the publishing industry, which has, to date, shown me none.

my friend stefan, who is not actually named stefan but who has every other quality of a stefan — the slim glasses, the opinions about croissants, the apartment where every book is in alphabetical order by the author’s middle name — read the novel in 2017, the year it came out. stefan said it was “fine”. stefan says everything is fine. stefan, when given a sandwich, says “this is a fine sandwich” and means it as a deep compliment. when stefan says a novel is fine, the novel is, somewhere, a masterpiece. i’m taking that as data.

verdict, i recommend the title

i recommend the title. i recommend the concept of the novel. i recommend, with great enthusiasm, the version of the novel that exists in my head, which is shorter than the real one and contains more microwaves. i recommend, more cautiously, the actual novel by elif batuman, which is, by every account i have, an excellent book that i intend to read at some unspecified point in the future, possibly in 2027, possibly never.

but mostly, i recommend the act of being one. the title is a description. it fits more of us than would care to admit. selin, in the book, is one. i, at this desk, am one. and you, reading a post by a stranger about a novel that stranger has not read, are — i mean this with affection — also one.

welcome. there are no dues. the meetings are imaginary.

carla rolled past. screen down. i think we’re fine. she had a folder. folders, in this office, are the universal language for “i may circle back.”

(if you want to see the title the idiot in another form entirely, dostoevsky’s 1869 original was adapted into a 1958 soviet film, which has, by my count, the most beautiful sad faces ever assembled in a single production. the imdb page for the 1958 soviet idiot film adaptation is, itself, a small work of art. five minutes on it is a better afternoon than most.)

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