‘Selin is the luckiest person in her family: the only one who was born in America and got to go to Harvard. Now it’s her second year, 1996, and Selin knows she has to make it count. The first order of business: she has to figure out the meaning of everything that happened over the summer. Why did Selin’s elusive crush, Ivan, find her that job in the Hungarian countryside? What was up with all those other people in the Hungarian countryside? Why is Ivan’s ex-girlfriend now trying to get in touch with her? On the plus side, her life feels like the plot of an exciting novel. On the other hand, why do so many novels have crazy, abandoned women in them? How does one live a life as interesting as a novel – a life worthy of becoming a novel — without becoming a crazy, abandoned woman oneself?
Guided by her literature syllabus and by her more worldly and confident peers, Selin reaches certain conclusions about the universal importance of parties, alcohol and sex, and resolves to execute them in practice – no matter the cost. Next on the list: international travel.
Unfolding with the propulsive logic and intensity of youth, Either/Or is a landmark novel by one of our most brilliant writers. Hilarious, revelatory and unforgettable, its gripping narrative will confront you with searching questions that persist long after the last page.’
Having thoroughly enjoyed Elif Batuman’s debut novel The Idiot (2017), I couldn’t wait to get my hands on its sequel, Either/Or, which sees Selin, our second-generation Turkish-American protagonist, through her second year at Harvard. The Idiot is that rare thing, a genuinely hilarious and memorable novel; Batuman’s self-satirising but generous reframing of the campus genre perfectly captures the tension between the self-aggrandisement and self-doubt of early adulthood, that heady combination of intellectual arrogance, acute self-consciousness, and worldly innocence that tends to define university life. Without discrediting The Idiot in any way, Either/Or testifies to the years Batuman has spent honing her craft, creating an even funnier, tauter novel that enchants the reader with its open-handed candour and winking self-awareness. While skirting the pretentiousness and morose navel-gazing that so irritated me in Sally Rooney’s novels, Batuman creates a wholly convincing and charming protagonist in Selin, allowing this teenage protégée to examine and narrate the trials and triumphs of her own relatively mundane life with clear-eyed, dry wit, using the frames of reference supplied by her study of Russian literature, philosophy, linguistics, and so on. While The Idiot derives its title from Fyodor Dostoevsky’s 1869 novel, Either/Or is named after the debut publication by the Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard, in which he teases out the implications of living either aesthetically or ethically. This theory of divergent modes of life captures Selin’s imagination, informing her futile and frustrating quest to impose a causal, novelistic narrative on her own real, messy, and frequently boring experience, to tease out and sculpt ‘the thread of the story about my life’.
In borrowing her novel’s titles from nineteenth-century leviathans, Batuman establishes the twin threads of glinting mischief and earnest erudition that interweave throughout her writing. The influence of the Great Books of Dead White Men, from Dostoevsky and Kierkegaard to Alexander Pushkin and Henry James, is understood to have a keen impact on Selin and her intellectual development; although her lack of deference is refreshing and hilarious, especially when it comes to the treatment of women in such works, the difficulties she has in applying the hegemonic tradition underpinning her education to her own experiences and ambitions cause her genuine pain and confusion. With seemingly effortless grace, Batuman succeeds in synthesising complex conceptual theories with Selin’s narrative irreverence, highlighting the inescapable and enduring value of the literary and philosophical canon while puncturing its grandiosities, dissecting its weaknesses, and insisting that space can always be made for disregarded points of view.
While Either/Or is an accomplished novel in myriad ways, the characterisation of Selin is undoubtedly its greatest strength. Batuman has indicated that the novels draw heavily on her own experiences and memories as a college student, and her capacity to reconstruct and recalibrate her youthful self with such a considered blend of sardonic fondness and heartfelt compassion is remarkable. Selin strikes an amazing balance between self-awareness and unquestioning acceptance, existing at the juncture of piercing intellect and intransigent immaturity. On the one hand, she debates the logic of the departmental categorisation of various courses in Harvard, and undercuts the arbitrary classification of knowledge, railing against peers who uncritically imbibe historical and parental influences. On the other hand, she is inspired to undertake a module on chance in literature based on the research interests of Ivan, the mysterious and intensely irritating Hungarian post-graduate student with whom she has fallen in love. Selin’s sexual and social innocence is combined with an endearing practicality; her forthright and unembarrassed logic fuses with a wit so dry as to give the air of being unconscious at times, particularly in relation to her melded horror and curiosity towards sex:
‘“It finally happened,” Svetlana said. “I had sex with Matt. And afterwards I thought, today this really important step in my life has taken place. But how is it physically different than if yesterday I had just jammed in a banana?”
The dining hall seemed to have just gotten a shipment of particularly large and underripe bananas. Rigid and green-tinged, they were sharply curved at one end and less curved at the other, which gave them a smirky, jawlike aspect. To me, an apple had been the obvious choice. But Svetlana had taken a banana, and was holding it up now.
“It’s literally the same thing,” she said.
I eyed the banana, estimating its girth at about six times that of a tampon. And yet, Svetlana wasn’t the kind of person who used “literally” to mean “figuratively”.
As usual, she seemed to know what I was thinking. “It turns out Matt has a really big one,” she said, in a tone of combined exasperation, humour, and pride.
“But, like…” I glanced – eloquently, I felt – at the banana.
“I know, I was so surprised. It’s weird how you can’t tell what size a guy is going to be.”
“But how did you…How did it…”
“Well, it was excruciatingly painful, especially the first time. But after two or three times, it basically goes in. You don’t feel like it’s possible, but obviously your body’s capacity is greater than your awareness of it. I mean, the circumference of a baby’s head is thirty-five centimetres.”
I felt a wave of despair.’
Such interactions between Selin and her Serbian best friend Svetlana punctuate the novel; Svetlana is fascinating but comically outlandish, waltzing through life with all the romance and drama that Selin craves while maintaining a dispassionately analytical eye on her own character and impulses. As the two friends navigate the liminal space between adolescence and adulthood, they feel everything with ferocious intensity, and speak about their emotions and impulses with a self-awareness that lies somewhere between scathing irony and total earnestness. On the one hand, they are too intelligent to allow their lives to be defined by men, or to want that to be the case, but on the other hand, they are obsessed with sex; Selin can’t help her hellish infatuation with Ivan, and feels doomed as a result, asking the terrifyingly pertinent question of whether men are ever as incapacitated by heartbreak as women are. There is genuine anger in Selin’s consideration of the skewed power dynamics of gender relations, and Batuman has suggested that her frustration and feelings of isolation stem from her total absorption of heteronormative expectations with which her personality is ultimately incompatible. Existing alongside this, at times highly articulate, rage, is a naive self-importance: Selin and Svetlana intellectualise the most banal and hormone-driven aspects of their lives; even their ideas about imposing aesthetic and ethical frameworks on their experiences are so earnestly grandiose as to become oddly sweet. Readers are left in no doubt as to the intelligence of these characters, whom Batuman refuses to condescend to, but the bubble that is the university campus is fondly ridiculed throughout the novel:
‘When Riley asked me to room with her, I immediately agreed, even though I didn’t know her that well. Riley was the most intransigent person I knew, and the funniest. Her closest friends – Oak, Ezra, and Lucas – were guys, and were “serious about comedy.” Telling jokes – like getting in arguments, or playing ping-pong – was one of the many seemingly casual and non-professional human activities that turned out, in college, to be a rigorous, technical discipline that some people studied day and night, and pursued to a competitive career path. When I sat with them in the cafeteria – Riley, upright and self-contained like a cat, the three others with their long limbs extending variously over and under the table, and all of them shooting a joke back and forth, escalating for more steps than I thought possible, prosecuting its ramifications like fine points of the law – it seemed to me imperative to keep such people close to me, both to be cushioned against the vicissitudes of life, and to learn how they did it.’
Similarly, Selin describes the social system of university existence in feudal, patronage-based terms, showing her dual bemusement and incisiveness to hilarious effect. Despite the consistently satirical undertone of the novel, Batuman exhibits profound respect for the opportunities four short years at university afford these curious and ambitious characters to engage in arcane and obscure debates, to indulge their most esoteric interests without dwelling excessively on future career paths. Although there are times when Selin is so naive as to make the reader sweat on her behalf, she genuinely questions everything, and the resources made available to her at Harvard allow her to do so. With admirable restraint, Batuman indicates that, although the traditional body of knowledge imparted by such prestigious universities may occlude the tragic circumstances of the death of Iphigenia, for example, it also allows for their rediscovery. The message seems to be not to throw the baby out with the canonical bathwater, but to maintain an undiscriminating irreverence towards every school of thought, every literary movement, and every philosophical theory. Selin’s refusal to defer to ‘greatness’ or to the critics of greatness is used to excellent comedic effect, as in the wry despair she feels towards Helene Cisoux’s concept of an écriture feminine: ‘What if I didn’t want to collaborate that way? What if I wanted to use logic, by myself, in an “objective” way – without mothers or menstrual blood?’ These same intellectual impulses can also be ethically penetrative at times, as in Selin’s analysis of the appropriate attitude one should have towards Picasso and his work. Selin is able to make a case for separating the artist from the individual:
‘By then I was thinking more practically about how to become a writer, and I understood that a person had to appreciate Picasso – not all of him, but the part that was an artist. It was an intellectual exercise that made you feel proud of your open-mindedness and objectivity. You could note how he was an asshole, and hold it in part of your mind, and then, with the rest of your mind, appreciate how totally he had managed to express himself. If you were in favour of individualism, self-expression, and human achievement; if you believed it was admirable to stay alive and awake, to not be deadened and blinded by conventions; if you were generous, subtle, capable of complexity and nuance – capable, to put it differently, of forgiveness, and of surmounting your own grievances in the interest of “the human” – then you had to like Picasso.’
And yet, alongside this lofty insistence on nuance and complexity, Selin executes a devastating critique of the cruelty of Picasso’s art, its violence towards the women in his life:
‘Green, jagged, screaming, Dora crammed into her mouth a handkerchief that resembled broken glass. Her body was crucified onto an armchair. Her face was woven into a basket. When Picasso left her for Francoise, who was twenty years younger than Dora (and forty years younger than Picasso), Dora was found naked in the stairwell of her apartment. She ended up in a sanatorium, getting electric shock therapy for three weeks. Lacan cured her, but she came out a Catholic, and didn’t make any art for ten years.’
True to form, Batuman holds both perspectives up to the reader’s scrutiny like mirrors, grinning slyly as she refuses to privilege one above the other.
Selin’s views on the morality of art and artists are all the more apposite in light of her own literary ambitions. Once again, her aspirations teeter on a tightrope between her own self-importance and self-doubt, and Batuman really digs to the heart of all the moral quandaries, insecurities, assumptions, and fears that face young writers:
‘It wasn’t until high school, when I took my first creative writing class, that I began to sense trouble. I realised, with shock, that I wasn’t good at creative writing. I was good at grammar and arguing, at remembering things people said, and at making stressful situations seem funny. But it turned out these were not the skills you needed in order to invent quirky people and give them arcs of desire. I already had my hands full writing about the people I actually knew, and all the things they said. That was what I needed writing for. Now I had to invent extra people and think of things for them to say?
It turned out that writing what you were already thinking about wasn’t creative, or even writing. It was “navel-gazing”. To be obsessed by your own life experience was childish, egotistical, unartistic, and worthy of contempt. I tried to get around the problem by ascribing my own thoughts and observations to a fictional character – one with a neutral, universal name, because I didn’t want to seem like I was constantly harping on being Turkish. I didn’t like books where the whole point seemed to be that the person was from some country, and they kept going on about the food. And yet, the things I was writing about somehow didn’t make sense unless the people were from another country, and I didn’t know enough about any other countries besides Turkey.’
Evidently, Selin’s contemptuous comments about using your own life as material, of writing the kind of autofiction Batuman is engaging in herself, are intended to be taken with a pinch of salt, particularly given Selin’s irresistible compulsion to read parallels between the texts she studies and her own life. However, there is a wry poignance to Batuman’s portrayal of the struggle Selin endures of knowing herself to be genuinely suffering while being consumed by the apprehension of her own privilege and the guilt of comparative hardship. The duality of this perspective will be familiar to many readers, and is all the more acute at Selin’s age, when comparison is so psychically dominant. The dual nature of Selin’s identity also fuels her malaise; she feels uncomfortable indulging her feelings of heartbreak and, indeed, depression, due to her sensitivity to the abundance of her American upbringing in comparison with the experiences of her Turkish cousins. In fact, this sensitivity contributes to Selin’s belated hedonism and sexual awakening, as Batuman taps into the impatience and anxiety of youth, encapsulated by the apprehension that these are supposed to be the best years of your life, and the uncertainty of whether you’re even having a good time. Further complicating Selin’s doubts about the validity of writing about her own experiences is her searing capacity for vindictiveness. Selin’s naivety and intellectual malleability are compounded by the callousness of youth; she has a genuine nasty streak that makes her all the more authentic (and endearing). This acerbic viciousness erupts into the narrative at times, reminding readers of just how young Selin is, and how turbulent her emotions are, as when she lashes out at her therapist: ‘I didn’t need some underachiever with a master’s degree to tell me how my problem was that nobody loved me the way he loved his defeated, conformist-looking wife.’ As indicated by Selin’s awareness of her capacity to make stressful situations seem funny, these unguarded moments of venom betray her weaponisation of humour to mask insecurity and anxiety; her furious put-downs can also be exquisite in delivery, as in her description of her mother’s ex-boyfriend Jerry as a ‘short bald man with a visibly bad personality’, or this quietly eviscerating comment about her friend Lakshmi’s boyfriend Jon: ‘Lakshmi was still in love with Noor, but had started dating Jon, a senior who wrote fiction and had a short story in almost every issue of the literary magazine. I had never successfully read one of his stories.’
Batuman uses both The Idiot and Either/Or to ask pointed questions about literary merit, particularly in the context of the arguable industrialisation of creative writing in American universities. Selin, having attended a seminar on creative writing, balks at the task of describing her bed, feeling understandable frustration at the mundanity of the assignment and the lengthy apprenticeship she perceives stretching out before her. She also panics at the competition surrounding literary creation among her peers; she joins the editorial team of the university literary magazine out of a sense of duty, and despairs at the thought of a formulaic route to authorhood being mapped out and methodically pursued by those serious about their ambitions. Nonetheless, Batuman is pitch perfect in capturing Selin’s voice as an aspiring writer; readers can see Selin flexing her descriptive muscles, tentatively poeticising her observations before yielding to the bathos of the occurrences of her plotless existence. Similarly, Selin visibly hones her craft when describing a matching velvet outfit given to her by her aunt, engaging obliquely with the assignment she had outwardly rejected. The effect is endearing and mesmeric, particularly for anyone who has considered creative writing themselves, plagued by fears of failure and inadequacy.
Ultimately, Either/Or stands as an excellent character study, its meandering and introspective plot riding on the vibrancy and relatability of Selin’s voice. Despite its relative uneventfulness, the novel makes for compulsive reading, as the debates Selin has with herself and her peers about her own experiences and the texts and ideas she encounters are wholly engrossing and familiar. The quality of the prose seems effortless, but Batuman is meticulous in creating a narrative voice that is sufficiently sophisticated to digest the complex intellectual content of Selin’s courses, and sufficiently casual to seem convincingly adolescent. The balance is difficult to strike; despite the diary-like quality of the narrative, the prose is taut, seamless, and expertly crafted:
‘A poem in Real Change titled, incredibly, “And to think, she’d never been kissed.” Was I losing my mind?
Innocence tempted with the chance
To feel the pleasures of the flesh
Childhood stolen at twenty-three
The minute his tongue met her breast
Childhood stolen at…twenty-three? How long had that person planned to, like, treasure her childhood? Yet I filed away the mention, as I always did, of any person who had been older than nineteen when they first kissed someone. Once, I had heard a writer on NPR say that he hadn’t kissed anyone until he was twenty-five. But he had been born in the 1940s. The rest of the poem was about how the regrets came later, but for now there was just “pleasure, pain, supposed love, / And just being in his arms.” What were the regrets that came later? Was it that she had thought he loved her, and then it turned out he didn’t? It couldn’t be that again – could it? Was that what everything was about?’
Either/Or may be set in the privileged microcosm of an Ivy League college, and the issues faced by its adolescent protagonists may be fairly quotidian, but the novel demands more of its readers than lightweight flippancy. There is a cool subversiveness to Batuman’s probing of the nature of the novel, and the criteria that determine a worthy story, or a worthy narrator. Much like The Idiot, Either/Or was a joy to read, and I am very much hoping that Batuman will follow Selin to the end of her university days, at the very least.