Why I Love 'The Idiot'

Or, the world's only perfect book

Introduction:
I wrote almost all of this essay in the fall of 2021 when an acquaintance from college asked me to write about The Idiot for a literary magazine. I never ended up sending this to them, for reasons I can no longer remember, but I just remembered it existed and I want to share it. I have edited it sparingly—as it turns out I’m less pretentious at 27 than I was at 24—and have included a brief nod to the novel’s 2022 sequel, Either/Or. You should read both books, and you should buy them from an indie bookstore - if you click the link you will be directed to a site that connects you directly with indie bookstores in your area that stock your chosen titles.

I read Elif Batuman’s The Idiot for the first time in the spring of 2018. It’s her debut novel, a campus story set at Harvard in 1995. The bildungsroman follows Selin Karadağ, our 18-year-old heroine who is obsessed with aesthetics and linguistics and books. The timing was apt; I was more than halfway through my own undergraduate education at an elite institution, and I was bewitched by the romantic and professional possibilities contained in the digital realm. Like Selin, I’m tall and possess large feet. Height is so rarely ungainly and ungraceful in literary protagonists—this, too, felt significant.

My love affair with The Idiot began tentatively. At first, the lack of structure was off-putting to me. I kept waiting for a plot to emerge, and it never did. Slowly, however, I became consumed with Selin’s inner monologue. Many times I audibly gasped to myself, unable to believe that this author who had never met me had transcribed so many thoughts I’d never spoken out loud. Her friendship with the talkative, bright Svetlana reminded me of the electrifying conversations I had with my own friends about dream analysis and how we want to move through the world. Her bewilderment about the elusive social mores of college mirrored my own from when I started school three years prior. And of course, it was the moments with Ivan, the taciturn older mathematics major who captures her heart, that hit me the hardest.

It is an oversimplification to describe The Idiot as a romance novel. It is first and foremost about academia and coming-of-age, about the plight of brilliant young people searching for a place in the adult world and realizing that raw intelligence can only get you so far. But at the heart of this book is Selin’s abortive attempt at romance. Her misplaced affection for the unavailable Ivan is the engine that pushes her to learn Russian, to repeatedly try alcohol even though she hates the taste, to travel to a remote part of Hungary for the summer just to extend her dwindling time in his company. It’s also the catalyst for some literary experimentation, as their extended email flirtation prompts investigation into Neruda, Freud, Balzac—Selin demands to know why analyzing their lengthy correspondence has any less literary merit than reading works from the Western canon. It invites larger commentary about whose stories we value and why. Batuman’s thorough, thoughtfully written inclusion of this adolescent crush does not diminish the value of the work, but in fact reinforces it.

I reread the book for the first time a year later, while coping with a heartbreak over a boy who bore some similarity to Ivan; I loved him while he lived in my city, and then he moved away. I was also finishing my final semester of college and staring down the barrel of postgrad life. Living vicariously through Selin’s youthful confusion & misadventures was a welcome escape. I read the book again at the end of 2019 while traveling to the American South and then to the UK, and Batuman’s irresistible passages about being in transit inspired some of my best longform writing to date. During the summer of 2020, I was healing from yet another heartbreak, this time from an Ivan clone of a different variety—tall, dark, academic, condescending, inscrutable—and I read the book again. After months of pandemic loneliness and cabin fever, I relished this journey through the text, dragging it out as long as humanly possible, reminiscing on a time when leaving the house and talking to people and getting on airplanes could happen without any epidemiological calculus. At the top of 2021 I read The Idiot again; I began the year with a string of disappointing reads and knew the only cure was Elif Batuman’s clever, wrenching, oddball turns of phrase.

I have recommended this book to everyone I know. When I insisted that my 2020 paramour read the book, he texted me to discuss when he finished it, and then never spoke to me again. At the time I was crushed, but in hindsight it was a perfect conclusion to our relationship. There is no book on earth that makes me feel more understood and fed. For him to read it and then immediately lose interest in me—whether consciously or not—was, of course, a blessing. After my first time through the text, I pored over reviews, searching for intense, glowing praise that could match my own. I was baffled by reviews that described Selin as cold or detached; there were passages so vulnerable I found myself having to pause before I could continue.

After I began seeing a therapist, I understood why. She remarked to me: “You say that you’re overwhelmed by your feelings, but what you’re describing to me aren’t feelings, they’re thoughts. You’re not letting yourself actually feel these things. You’re analyzing them.” It was an eerie mirror to Selin’s own experience with a therapist, who told her that what she felt for Ivan was not love, but rather the fulfillment of her need for a “noninterpersonal interpersonal relationship.” The aching familiarity I saw in Selin, then, was the fear of feeling, the knowledge that if I ever really let myself feel the things I meditated on for so long and so hard, it might kill me.

Batuman’s novel has remained my blueprint for fiction. Every bookstore employee who has the misfortune of servicing me will be asked what they have in stock that reminds them of The Idiot. I have isolated a few factors that make the book tick for me—I love campus novels, stories about books and writers, fiction written by women—but there is something inside of The Idiot that defies description. I have endeavored to describe it many times—it’s like her writing is like a background rendered in perfect detail while the subject in the foreground remains a silhouette. It’s like she crawled inside of my brain and translated my thoughts into another, more beautiful language. It feels the way mumblecore movies feel, it feels like pressing your forehead against the glass and listening to the rain, it feels like people watching in airport terminal but having nowhere in particular to be. Nothing quite gets at the warmth and familiarity and comfort of Batuman’s prose, how even the densest passages about physics or foreign cinema ultimately invite you in. Her greatest skill is how she depicts bizarre people in a way that is both bemused and loving. While reading The Idiot, I am not my usual self, the type who runs from social discomfort at all costs. I am, as Selin is, the girl who walks right up to mistranslation and children’s beauty pageants and taxidermy and says, do your worst.

I have often stated that The Idiot is the world’s only perfect book. However, this attribution comes at a cost—is it possible, really, that I read the best book I will ever read at 20 years old, that the next sixty-plus years will be a parade of second place attempts? I like to think that it isn’t true. The 2022 sequel, Either/Or, delivered on so much of what I loved about the original installment, but I still haven’t found a book that makes me feel the way The Idiot does. I will continue haunting the bookstores of Los Angeles County in search of a heroine who makes me feel as seen and heard as Selin does. And of course, there is the possibility that one day I will write the book I’m looking for.