The Idiot: ingenue finds love, she thinks, among Harvard liberals

This is a love story, though this is the least worldly romance you will likely read this year.

Elif Batuman follows The Possessed with a debut novel, The Idiot.

In the comments below one online review of Elif Batuman’s first book, The Possessed, a couple of readers take issue with the reviewer’s claim that Russian literature isn’t funny. In the right translation, they agree, it is a “riot of laughs” — except for Tolstoy, and Solzhenitsyn.

One suspects this thread would delight the Turkish-American author, whose funny, cleverly absurd collection of essays about the world of Russian literary studies and its obsessive scholars was a surprise hit of 2010.

Borrowing her title from Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novel about tortured intellectuals, Batuman took readers into the weird intensity of seven years of doctoral study in Russian and comparative literature at Stanford University. In a feat of extreme recollection — surely based on superb journal-keeping — she celebrated a hot-housed social order based on urgent, small discriminations.

Filled with minute observation, yet cheerfully digressive, The Possessed celebrated the pleasures of Russian literature but also ranged across Batuman’s eccentric family, conferences, the weird quirks of the Turkish and Uzbek languages, and her travels to Russia, Hungary, Italy and, in the throes of a failing relationship, Uzbekistan.

Batuman established a winning persona as a high-achieving slacker and weirdo magnet who brought an addiction to human eccentricity and over-revved intellect to all that she encountered. Before The Possessed was even published, early essays had earned the then 32-year-old a gig as a staff writer for The New Yorker, where she has since been bringing her hyper-acute but oblique eye to subjects as diverse as Vladimir Nabokov’s butterflies, Russian meteors and Turkish politics.

And so her first novel, which also borrows its title from Dostoevsky, arrives with a serious buzz of expectation.

The Idiot is a kind of fictional prequel to The Possessed. In this comic novel, Turkish-American Selin tells the story of her confusing freshman year at Harvard. This is also a love story, though this is the least worldly romance you are likely to read this year.

Raised in New Jersey, as Batuman was, 18-year-old Selin comes to Harvard (as Batuman did) to undertake a liberal arts degree: this often-satirised American degree (think ­DeLillo’s Department of Hitler Studies in White Noise) offers students a smorgasbord of subjects more specialised and esoteric than any you would find in an Australian arts degree, with the aim that they will experiment intellectually before locking on to a career path.

Moving into her dorm with two equally life-challenged roommates, who seem just as asexual and panicked, she makes her slightly baffled way through subjects such as “Constructed Worlds”, and in Russian class befriends the more confident Svetlana, a wealthy Bosnian refugee who receives gifts from her analyst.

The book opens with a marvellous epigraph from Marcel Proust, who writes in In Search of Lost Time that adolescence is a “ridiculous age” but “the only period in which we learn anything”. Batuman’s chief novelistic interest seems to be in how very green these students are, perhaps even more than the average teenager because of the life of hyper-achievement that has brought them to Harvard.

In Russian class, Selin finds herself attracted to Ivan, a slightly older maths major from Hungary; while noticing from the beginning that their relationship has weird echoes of “Nina in Siberia”, a love-story-as-textbook written by Harvard professors, whose plot is hobbled by its rationing of complicated Russian declensions. Armoured by their intellects, the two begin a tortured correspondence via the new technology of email, hilariously real in its awkward striving and intensity of cross purpose.

Unsure of whether they are even in a relationship (Ivan seems already to have a girlfriend), Selin ends up volunteering to teach English in rural Hungary for five weeks because he will be there. This comic portrait of the earnest American volunteers abroad (readers will recognise outlines and some details from its nonfictional treatment in The Possessed) makes up the second half of the novel. Still, even here, in Ivan’s homeland, not much happens.

But is Selin an idiot? Just as Dostoevsky’s titular “idiot”, Prince Myshkin, appeared foolish only to those who discredited his simple goodness, Batuman nudges us to see Selin’s refusal to judge others as a stubborn originality of vision. But the title resonates on a second level, alerting us to the fact that Batuman’s novel constantly offers a meta-narrative about novels and writing: so Selin regularly contemplates her own life as a case study of the complications of language and story. (Then again, it might be that the idiot is Ivan.)

The strength of Batuman’s novel is its deadpan tenderness for these oh-so-young souls. She is also entirely unafraid of representing intellectual ideas in substantive detail. And yet as sharply evocative and funny as its observations are, The Idiot seems to be missing the transformative magic that makes a novel.

This is partly because it lacks the sprightly, more mature perspective that makes Batuman’s nonfiction so engaging (there is so little hindsight that it’s never quite clear what point Selin is remembering from). And partly because The Idiot seems ultimately less driven by an artistic vision than by a debt to remembered detail.

Selin is so relentless in her accumulation of observation that she reminded me of another literary figure: Jorge Luis Borges’ “Funes the Memorious”, a young boy cursed with the memory of everything that he has ever seen or said. The Idiot is often charming and painfully funny; but overall, its close-ups come at the cost of the big picture.

Delia Falconer is a writer and critic.

The Idiot

By Elif Batuman

Jonathan Cape, 432pp, $32.99