A Conversation with Elif Batuman on Freshman Awkwardness, Email, and Her Novel The Idiot
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Elif Batuman’s debut novel, The Idiot, is a novel about language. Or, more specifically, it’s about language’s inability to communicate feelings or ideas accurately. If that sounds boring or unfunny, then I suppose I’m proving Batuman’s point because The Idiot is rich and comedic; it’s also meandering and wonderfully weird but even these adjectives don’t quite do the novel justice.
Like her previous short story collection The Possessed, The Idiot is preoccupied with language, particularly as it’s used and experienced by the novel’s protagonist, Selin. Set in 1995, the book follows 18-year-old Selin, the daughter of Turkish immigrants, through her freshman year at Harvard (a clear stand-in for Batuman, who also went to Harvard in the ‘90s and is the daughter of Turkish immigrants). On arriving, Selin enrolls in classes about the theory of language, an art course suggestively called Constructed Worlds, and first-year Russian. If Selin were an average 18-year-old, then The Idiot would be a standard campus novel, part comedic and part coming-of-age. Instead, Selin observes friends and roommates with disarming intensity, effectively trying to figure out how a person should act or should communicate, with little to no success. Selin is consumed with thoughts about the structure of things, “neither pleasant nor useful,” she says, admitting that she “has no idea what you were supposed to be thinking about.”
Selin’s preoccupation with how a person should speak or behave paralyzes her. In one particularly painful and funny passage, Selin is unable to answer when an acquaintance casually asks “How are you?” because there are no words to authentically describe the answer. She does not understand the concept of small talk; she doesn’t understand that no one actually wants an answer to an otherwise intimate question. Language, and its relationship to how thought works, plague Selin. In her Russian class, she and classmates are asked to translate Nina in Siberia, a passage written specifically for first-year Russian speakers, about a Soviet-era woman looking for her missing lover and falling in love with someone else instead. The text is awkwardly written; its tenses are not-quite-right because the passage employs only those that Selin and her peers have learned in class. “What Slavic 101 couldn’t name didn’t exist,” Batuman writes. The result is a story that’s weird and haunting (hundreds of pages later, I was still thinking about Nina in Siberia) but ultimately unsatisfying. “Of everything I had read that semester, it alone had seemed to speak to me directly, to promise to reveal something about the relationship between the language and the world,” Batuman writes. Ultimately, like everything else, Nina in Siberia “felt like a terrible betrayal.”
But if Nina in Siberia was a narrative disappointment, then it provides Selin an opportunity to reach out to Ivan, the Hungarian student she has a crush on. As standard in beginning language classes, Selin and Ivan have been required to reenact the passage becoming a kind of inside joke that prompts an email exchange. Batuman’s take on email, brand new and exciting in 1995, is particularly witty (in many respects, The Idiot is a novel about email). “Each message contained the one that had come before, and so your own words came back to you—all the words you threw out, they came back,” Batuman writes about the new technology. “It was like the story of your relations with others, the story of the intersection of your life with other lives, was constantly being recorded and updated and you could check it at any time.”
There’s also a wealth of memories in Batuman’s passages on technology which inadvertently make The Idiot a bit of a period piece. Selin “fingers” Ivan to see if he’s checked his email; she considers the line between the “written self” presented via email and the real person (before the casual concept of “IRL” existed, such distinctions were necessary); she wonders if obsessing over one of Ivan’s emails is equivalent to the academic discourse on Balzac. “Wasn’t what I was doing in a way more authentic, and more human?” she asks of the comparison. Batuman’s observations about technological intervention into relationships is wry and observed with an almost disconcerting ambivalence.
The relationship eventually morphs into something real, or at least something more tangible than email and Selin—smart but still an 18-year-old—follows Ivan to Hungary. There, Selin applies her same ambivalent worldview to her relationship and new people. She learns only that language fails, that the workings of language will forever be a mystery and that no one is eighteen forever.
I spoke to Batuman about language, email, and Nina in Siberia. Our conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.
JEZEBEL: I wanted to ask about the role of language in the book, particularly its failure to do what we want—and sometimes what we need—it to do. I was wondering if you could talk a bit about how that concept plays out in The Idiot?
ELIF BATUMAN: I think that Selin is someone who really wants a direct connection between what people say and language in general and truth. She doesn’t quite understand that language is a convention. So when people say things, she takes them at face value and interrogates them in a way that they aren’t meant to be interrogated. There’s a scene where she’s in a job interview and they ask her, “What do we miss out on if we don’t hire you?” And even though this is a question that they ask everyone—the question is a rote job interview question—she’s wondering what the meaning of the question really is.