When nerds collide. Salin Karadağ, a first-generation Turkish-American nineteen year old from New Jersey, starts her first year at Harvard in 1995. She wants to be a writer, and takes courses in linguistics, philosophy of language and Russian, apparently using the same logic that suggests becoming a heart surgeon to learn about love. And Salin wants to learn about love because she meets Ivan Varga in her Russian class. Ivan is a stereotypical math major, and a senior who will be moving cross-country to start graduate work: two strikes against. Salin, like an umpire not paying attention to the game, keeps missing Ivan’s third strikes, and doggedly pursues him. Which is fortunate because, to the extent that The Idiot has a plot, it’s how the relation between Salin and Ivan will turn out.
Otherwise The Idiot is a calendar year in the life of a first-year Harvard student. It might be a flânuer's novel, except Salin is a terrible flâneur, not only because she takes five courses per semester, but she also lives almost entirely in her overstuffed and idiosyncratic head. She has a flâneur’s observational skills, but not necessarily the skills to integrate observations into a larger scheme of things. She makes friends who are her intellectual or social betters (her friend Svetlana is both), but she fails to learn everything, or hardly anything, she could from them.
Salin is a tough bird to identify. Here she is in kindergarten:
I found myself remembering the day in kindergarten when the teachers showed us Dumbo, and I realized for the first time that all the kids in the class, even the bullies, rooted for Dumbo, against Dumbo's tormentors. Invariably they laughed and cheered, both when Dumbo succeeded and when bad things happened to his enemies. But they're you, I thought to myself. How did they not know? They didn't know. It was astounding, an astounding truth. Everyone thought they were Dumbo.
Here she is between her first and second years at Harvard:
“What did you bring your host family?”
“Chocolate.”
“Chocolate.” She sighed.
“I'm afraid I'll accidentally eat it all before I get there,” I said, following the rule that you had to pretend to have this problem where you couldn't resist chocolate.
If you have that kind of discernment in kindergarten, you should be a supernova by the time you hit Harvard as an undergrad.
Almost no plot, a confounding main character, this leaves Batuman as the last hope. She comes through, even though the story's told in Salin's voice. Her writing is unobtrusive, leaving everything up to Salin. Except Batuman's in charge, so she gets to plant clues around and through Salin's narration. Salin's familiarity with bullies in kindergarten hints at a K-through-12 school experience that shapes her particularities at Harvard, as do her high-school friends that follow her there. Salin is frequently perplexing, but Batuman is there to bring to mind the importance of paying attention.
The Idiot is also funny in a fish-out-of-water way, particularly when Salin goes to Hungary to teach English during the summer. While in Hungary, she meets Ivan, who's Hungarian, and they go on a canoe ride along a river. Being in a canoe is a good way to think about The Idiot, except you're not on a river where a current can move you along, you're floating in the middle of a lake, watching unfamiliar birds and fish.
Content warning: Before writing this review I read Batuman's follow-up book about Salin's second year at Harvard. I've tried to weed this review of events that happened in the follow up, but I make no promises.
