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For Selin, events are overwhelming, and deeper understanding is not available.
In the last line of the novel, Selin declares, I hadnt learned anything at all.
When I first readThe Idiotupon its release in spring 2017, I felt a real pressure to love it.
As a fellow former comp lit grad student, it was kind of like a family obligation.
I also love a novel that asks smart questions about the idea of the novel.
Being a freshman in collegeislike this: Too much random stuff happens for anything to accrue meaning yet.
I admired the gutsiness of its unresolved, bathetic ending but was nonetheless irked by it.
Somehow, it felt incredibly true to life and gimmicky at the same time.
This month, Batuman publishes a sequel,Either/Or.
its instantly clear thatEither/Oris a book more about thought than plot.
She obsesses over Ivan, who has left for graduate school at Berkeley.
We learn to trust Batumans way of capturing how feeling can leverage temporality.
These accumulating, inwardly directed queries generate the books momentum more than the events of the exterior world.
Yet miraculously, they work perfectly in this book, which moves unpredictably at the pace of deliberation.
But Selin doesnt follow Kierkegaards instructions and eitherread the whole book,orjust not read it at all.
When I read that, I almost threw up, she says of one section.
Wasnt that what had happened to me?
Together, the two books give an honest depiction of how growing upactuallyworks.
Either/Oralso has elements of a related throw in of coming-of-age story: theKunstlerroman, the novel ofartisticformation.
Here, though, its more like a prequel.
We know Selin wants to be a novelist, but we witness her write very little.
InThe Idiot,she pens one prize-winning short story that she finds embarrassing and doesnt want anyone to read.
InEither/Or,she enrolls in a creative-writing class, and were not privy to what she produces.
Selin is not sure shecanbe a novelist.
All the same, the reader remains firmly embedded in Selins perspective and the workings of her thoughts.
This perspective is a complicated one.
Her narration emanates simultaneously from some protected, deeply interior place and a profoundly distant, exterior one.
The distance here is achieved by time.
The effect is sometimes harrowing.
As Batuman writes, she had been hurt, and hurt, and hurt, for two hours.
Its truer to life for a story to unfurl unpredictably, to spill out of its own leaky container.
This impulse plays out across all three of Batumans books including her nonfiction debut,The Possessed.
