Elif Batuman, _The Idiot_

AN AMAZING DEBUT novel, I thought. Best novel of the year, possibly.

As with Batuman's non-fiction book of a few years back, The Possessed, the title evokes Dostoevsky. The main character is Selin Karadag, which I am guessing is metrically equivalent to "Elif Batuman." Like Batuman, Selin is the American-born daughter of Turkish parents, and like Batuman, she is matriculating at Harvard in the fall of 1995. I suspect Batuman drew on her own experiences in the novel, but who knows?

Selin is not a figure of unworldly saintliness like Prince Myshkin, but she is, like just about every first-year college student before or after 1995, a bit clueless and blundering. The biggest misstep is becoming obsessed with Ivan, a Harvard senior from Hungary. A great deal of flirting via e-mail occurs (e-mail was a newish thing in 1995), but Ivan cannot figure out quite what Selin wants, and Selin seems not altogether sure either. She even takes a summer job teaching English in Hungary with a view towards somehow crossing paths and getting together with Ivan, but then, once she is actually in Hungary, she waits two weeks before calling him.

Thus the 19th century novel that seems the closest precedent to Batuman's The Idiot is not Dostoevsky's novel of the same name, but Flaubert's L'Education Sentimentale, for Selin and Ivan rival Fréderic Moreau and Mme. Arnoux in the never-quite-getting-there department. (Or even the all-time champs, John Marcher and May Bartram.) The plot event we are anticipating for most of the novel's 400 pages never occurs.

Which seems perfect, to me.

But what I most enjoyed were Batuman's powers of observation, her ability to conjure up a milieu (a college dorm, a transatlantic flight), and particularly her voice. Deeper than that, the themes of the novel--not just Selin's sentimental education, but the vagaries of translation (hilarious and tragic), the peculiar entitlement of the USA, the ironies of elite education--could make this novel a classic down the line. I don't think I've relished a first novel this much since White Teeth. Is White Teeth a classic yet (17 years old already)? Well, I'm going to say it is.