The Idiot

Elif Batuman is a contemporary Turkish-American author. She received her BA from Harvard University and PhD in Comparative Literature from Stanford University and spent several years in Turkey as a resident writer at Koç University. Her first novel, The Idiot (2017), as well as her collection of essays, The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them (2010), are auto-biographical in nature and focus on life within US academia. Both titles allude to Fyodor Dostoevsky’s eponymous novels from 1869 and 1871, respectively. The Idiot was first drafted in the early 2000s, but was put aside for more than a decade. It is a highly fictionalized autobiographical bildungsroman about unrequited first love and the confusion and uncertainty caused by the advent of the Internet in the mid-1990s.

Currently a staff writer for the New York Times, Batuman has received multiple literary awards, such as the Whiting Writers’ Award, the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, and the Paris Review Terry Southern Prize for Humor. The Idiot was a finalist for the 2018 Pulitzer Prize in fiction.

Plot Summary

The novel closely follows one year in the life of a college freshman. The narrator, Selin, is a first-generation Turkish-American woman who grew up in a New Jersey suburb, but has extended family in Turkey who she visits every summer with her mother. Her parents are divorced and her father lives in Florida with his new wife and young son. Selin’s mother is a researcher at a local university and is dating an American man. The novel opens with the narrator’s arrival to Harvard College for orientation week in 1995.

The book’s plot is structured as a series of loosely related chronological episodes that define Selin’s interactions with other people and the world around her. She shares a dorm suite with two very different women: Hannah, a loud Korean-American, and Angela, a shy and religious African American. During her first weeks on campus, Selin befriends Svetlana, a neurotic international student from Serbia, and re-kindles her friendship with Ralph, a young man she met the previous summer at an academic program for high school students.

The main part of the narrative focuses on Selin falling in love with Ivan, another student in her Russian class. He is a senior from Hungary, who dreams about pursuing math at graduate school in California. Selin’s interactions with Ivan are very intense, although their relationship never goes beyond the platonic. Selin even agrees to teach English in a Hungarian village, in order to spend more time with Ivan over the summer. The two do meet up in Hungary, but their relationship does not progress any further despite attempts to articulate their feelings. At the end of July, they part for good. Ivan leaves for a conference in Japan, while Selin goes to Turkey. The narrator is heartbroken and even becomes physically ill, but eventually recovers.

Selin’s developing feelings for Ivan coincide with her struggles to understand how language relates to reality. Initially, she plans to major in linguistics. The more she studies linguistics and related subjects, however, the less coherent her thoughts and emotions become. At the end of summer, while spending time with her Turkish relatives in Antalya, Selin decides that linguistics is not the way to understand how language really works and decides to switch majors.