Review of The Idiot by Elif Batuman

“Most people, the minute they meet you, were sizing you up for some competition for resources. It was as if everyone lived in fear of a shipwreck, where only so many people would fit on the lifeboat, and they were constantly trying to stake out their property and identify dispensable people – people they could get rid of.... Everyone is trying to reassure themselves: I’m not going to get kicked off the boat, they are. They’re always separating people into two groups, allies and dispensable people... The number of people who want to understand what you’re like instead of trying to figure out whether you get to stay on the boat - it’s really limited.”

— Elif Batuman

The Idiot has been one of those novels I kept seeing for the longest time everywhere. It was on my Goodreads, Instagram, Google list searches of anticipated books from years ago—if you can name it, the book was manifesting on that platform in my life.

It took me several years to get myself together and actually check out a copy of this book, and I felt like the novel, especially since it was the size of a brick, was slapping me hard across the face.

Although I did not attend an Ivy League school and had a traditional business college experience—albeit at a fashion school—I could relate so hard to this main character. I could see so much of myself in her for the biggest part of the book, up until the final arc, that it honestly became kind of painful to read.

Onwards with the review! I have quite a bit to say about this one.

Selin is attending her freshman year at Harvard, where she must learn a lot more about herself.

The protagonist in this novel is the daughter of Turkish immigrants, and her name is Selin. The year is 1995 when the novel starts, and she has moved to Harvard University to start her freshman year. Selin is pretty lost in the way most freshman are at the beginning of the novel.

She doesn’t really know yet what she wants to do with her life, and so she ends up signing up for a bunch of classes in random subjects. Her course picks would really mirror mine, as she’s trying for a lot of theory-based classes in, for example, film or art, and, by chance, she decides to randomly take a Russian class.

She ends up befriending one of her Serbian classmates while in that class, whose name is Svetlana. Over the course of the novel, The Idiot basically consists of Selin trying to find herself in the world around her.

She ends up kind of deciding that she wants to be a writer, and she is taking the tentative steps towards getting there with all of the classes she’s taking. The Idiot kind of becomes a slice-of-life in this regard, as anyone who is familiar with the undergraduate experience at a US college, especially one like Harvard, will recognize a lot of the scenarios Selin is having.

There’s quite a bit of intellect thought and discussion sprinkled into the novel as well, which is exciting for someone like me. That’s why I thought this was the novel that hits too hard at times.

A good chunk of the book, starting around the halfway portion, ends up being dedicated to Selin’s weird relationship with Ivan. Ivan is another student in her Russian class, but he’s older and studies mathematics. The two end up talking through emails, which are a new novelty at the time in which the novel is set (the nineties).

Their emails are honestly kind of strange, but it ends up creating a romantic spark between them. So, instead of getting an internship over the summer, Selin ends up agreeing to first go to Paris with Svetlana, then meet Ivan’s friend in Hungary to teach English there.

Honestly, this is the section where I found the book to start extremely dragging. It became difficult to finish it once I hit the Hungary and Ivan sections, especially since Batuman spends so much time in the first sections of the book establishing Selin’s life and dynamic while at Harvard.

I kind of see why Batuman made that decision as a writer to take Selin out of that immersive academic world, one where she starts to flourish and see herself as a writer in, and put it in an entirely new test: a country where she doesn’t really speak the language.

And maybe that’s what Harvard is supposed to represent at the beginning of the book. It’s entirely new waters, and she does end up getting comfortable by the end.

And part of the problem is just that Ivan sucked. There’s this classic element to their romance where he pulls away and has like inner angst, which infuriates me.

I get it, she’s a freshman and needs to learn about getting burned by these kinds of men, but man do I hate having to read about it. Real life should not be repeating for me—all of this is to say, Batuman is striking a chord that might resonate with a lot here.

It’s realistic. I just didn’t want to read about it; doesn’t mean the novel is bad at all. This is also an exhausting novel to get through because of the switch in pacing, and those who don’t like more academic-based texts might quickly begin to lose steam from the beginning.

Overall Thoughts

I think this is a certain kind of novel for people who might like more academic-based work. I enjoyed a lot of the more intellectual discussions in it because this is what I’m used to, especially as someone in graduate school, but someone who’s used to more straightforward text might absolutely hate it and think it’s pretentious.

My verdict is that I genuinely enjoyed the first half of the novel, but found the second half difficult to get through. I would not recommend the second half of the novel to someone with similar taste as me, but I did enjoy the first arc.

I like going through her daily life, that’s the kind of content I watch and consume on a general basis. Reading is subjective, though, so I can see why someone might love the entire book versus one part like me.

I will say Batuman’s writing is excellent, and she does a good job of dropping the reader directly into this girl’s world.

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