Selin Gets Laid! Elif Batuman’s ‘Either/Or’

Elif Batuman has developed the ideal formula for what passes as the publication and regurgitation of serious literature in the 2020s. PHASE 1: Adopting the persona of a marginalised person, write a novel for which there is an obvious way forward to a sequel. End the sequel with something as obvious as the James Bond end-credit promising the return of 007 in the next instalment, so that the way is open for the third volume in what has then become a trilogy of bestselling and, therefore, worthy novels. PHASE 2: As in The Idiot (2017), make sure that nothing happens in the first volume. Spend the first half of the second volume, Either/Or (2022), recounting what didn’t happen in the first. Following this logic, the third volume should be able to virtually write itself by recombining what didn’t happen in the first and what didn’t matter in the second. (Dear God, please don’t let there be a third Selin novel!) Pick up a Pulitzer Prize nomination on the way through.

I am not suggesting that what happens in a novel should be the main criterion for quality in literature. Virtually nothing happens in a Beckett novel or play but lots of readers and theatre-goers would vouch for their value. Almost everything that happens in Joyce’s Ulysses or the autofiction of Karl Ove Knausgaard is the accumulation of the minutia of everyday life, its triviality and detritus. The problem is that in The Idiot and Either/Or, everything that does or doesn’t happen is narrated to us in the exasperating, toneless, humourless (sorry to all those New York blurb writers but Batuman’s fiction simply isn’t funny), insensitive and unsympathetic voice of Selin. As Batuman has said herself of so much contemporary fiction: who cares?

To be fair, significant things do happen in Either/Or. At the end of her second year as a student at Harvard University, Selin travels unaccompanied to her parents’ home country of Turkey and she travels alone widely there. Both on campus and in Turkey, she embarks upon her first sexual experiences with men. But almost everything is flattened out by Selin’s analytical distancing which tends to trivialise rather than to elucidate or illuminate. I’d nominate two exceptions to this flattening narrative style, both of them moments of landscape observation, one in Northern Cyprus, the other aboard a night-time bus in Turkey.

Through Selin, I have no doubt that Batuman is engaging in some very serious battles. The patriarchy is under fire both culturally and sexually, as it should be. The literary and cultural baggage of dead white men is impressively challenged by Selin’s deconstruction of the gendered pomposity of Henry James’ ‘Preface to The Portrait of a Lady’ and her questioning of the male constructions of Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina and Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. Thankfully, I don’t see Selin as an advocate for cancel culture. She never suggests that one shouldn’t read these novels. Rather, one should read them differently from the way the received wisdom of generations of white male criticism would have us read them and, more importantly, one should write new novels that speak to us of now and the worldview that we are trying to widen.

The sexual politics of patriarchy is radically reframed through Selin’s realisation of the extent of male domination of every aspect of sexual intercourse: to seek or not to seek consent; to hear or not to hear a woman saying ‘no’; to wear or not to wear a condom; to allow or not to allow clitoral stimulation to orgasm; to have or not to have either oral or anal sex. Selin also challenges the broader paradigm of why the initiation of a young woman’s sexual life should be solely heterosexual. What are the cultural markers that delimit this terrain, that map out such narrow and restrictive paths for us to follow in this so-called exploration of ourselves and of others’ bodies?

Can a novel about college life be a piece of great literature? Donna Tartt’s The Secret History (1992) answered that question decades ago as did the early lives of Willem and Jude, JB and Malcolm in Hanna Yanagihara’s mesmerizingly propulsive A Little Life (2015) more recently. Unfortunately, the deadpan linear, diary-like structure of Selin’s narration just doesn’t allow even the most important events and aspects of Either/Or to add up to more than the sum of their parts. To Batuman’s credit, though, that narrative voice has well and truly wormed its way inside my head so that I can just hear Selin herself disarmingly responding with, ‘Why should they?’ Whilst the nihilism of Batuman’s tabula rasa is admirable, its construction of a woman’s life remains curiously inert. If this is good literature, I would have to say it’s good Young Adult Literature.

By mere serendipity I stumbled across a radio interview which has really helped me understand why the championing of a novelist like Elif Batuman has me worried about the state of the art of writing. The New York art critic Jerry Saltz’s thesis is that eighty-five percent of art has always been crap. Whilst this a great time to be alive and working in the creative arts because the white male gatekeepers are gone and diversity is flourishing, that also means that female writers and writers from other marginalised quarters are also going to be contributing to that eighty-five percent. Tartt doesn’t. Yanagihara doesn’t. Batuman does.

“You are in shock. Not one work of art, not one movie, song, anything that’s been made in the twenty-first century has been made under anything like normal conditions… It took a long time to create apartheid in the art world, apartheid of more than fifty percent of the population that is female being represented almost at all… It’s taken a long time to… finally be making the first efforts. As a result, a lot of mediocrity is getting in… However, not much more mediocrity is getting in than was always getting in with white men… The point is, yes, there’s going to be some mediocre women artists, artists of colour, disabled, queer, whatever. As an old person I can now promise you with happiness and joy that the mediocrity always seems to fall away…” 

In the open-hearted generosity of spirit demonstrated by Jerry Saltz, let me finish by saying this. If reading the Selin novels of Elif Batuman brings you happiness and joy, if they help to liberate you from the oppression that you have suffered or sympathised with then, please, ignore my reservations and keep buying her, keep reading her, keep championing her.

Go to ‘Am I an Idiot?’

Am I an Idiot? Some Thoughts on Elif Batuman

by Adrian D’Ambra

I’ve been struggling to read Elif Batuman’s The Idiot, despite wanting to read it very much. So, let’s go back to the beginning. Why did I want to read this novel? Two reasons readily present themselves. Quite early in my career as a high school English teacher I taught for two years in Istanbul. During that time I was able to visit the Black Sea coast up close to the border with Georgia, Northern Cyprus, and travel as far east as Kurdish Diyarbakir and the border with Syria. The city itself, Istanbul, was at times, a difficult place to live, particularly in the winters. In the early 1990s the heating furnaces in the basements of most of the buildings were still fuelled by burning unprocessed lignite, so that the famous vistas across the Bosphorus disappeared beneath an impenetrable blanket of dirty, gritty smoke. But Istanbul was, for me, the City, an extraordinary palimpsest of civilisations bisected by one of the greatest waterways of the world and adorned with the flowers of Ottoman architecture, particularly the imperial mosques and minarets.

         Towards the ends of my two winters, Istanbul celebrated its annual international film festival. I remember very fondly now the frustration of attending a screening of one of my then favourite Australian films, Paul Cox’s Man of Flowers (1983). The volume was deliberately turned down very low, the subtitles were in French and a man with a microphone was delivering a live translation into Turkish. But the light was there on the screen, the southern light and the colour of the sky on a clear Melbourne day. The publication of an Orhan Pamuk novel was also celebrated in the bookshop windows up and down İstiklal Caddesi in a variety of Lego-like displays.

         Since then, I’ve read the novels of Orhan Pamuk as they’ve become available in English and I’ve recently been given one or two by Elif Shafak. I know that Batuman is not a Turkish resident, that she is the American child of Turkish migrants, but I was still interested in what she might be writing. I was also drawn to her by listening to a conversation that was recorded in Australia during one of our writers’ festivals in 2022. Reflecting on Selin and her young-adult female peers in The Idiot and its sequel, Either/Or, Batuman explained that these were intelligent, educated, even privileged young women whose lives were going fine until they embarked on their relationships with young men. These relationships brought tension and unease into their lives. I loved Batuman’s turn of phrase in the interview, her confidence and wit, and, as the father of three young adult daughters, how could I not be interested in Selin and her friends’ experiences?

         This next detail is an irrelevance because I never buy books based on what the blurbs say. However, on the paperback edition The Idiot is described as ‘masterfully funny’ and ‘frequently hilarious’. Whilst comic writing is not high on my list of literary preferences, I thought it might be possible to really enjoy reading this novel. I’m sorry, indeed, I’m embarrassed to say that I’m something like 350 pages in and real laughter has separated my lips precisely once. Selin is teaching English in a small Hungarian village on a summer exchange program. One of the local trainee English teachers is unimpressed with her pedagogy:

“This is your plan?” Rózsa asked afterward in a voice full of outrage. “Candies and games?”

         “That’s basically the American way.”

         “I think you are very…” She consulted her dictionary. “Inexperienced.”

         “We have different systems.”

         “Yes – I am serious, and you are not!” (357)

Batuman’s swipe at the American system of education which has produced her protagonist is genuinely ironically witty. Much earlier in the novel I had pretty much given up hope for that system myself as Selin and her fellow-students described their studies and their lecturers at Harvard. If this is what elite education looks like in the twenty-first century, I found myself thinking time and again, then America really is fucked.

         But what about the humour? Can someone who repeatedly reveals to us that she does not understand why people behave, speak, feel, think or write the way they do make us laugh? Can a character who appears to have almost no connection with her body, her gender, her sexuality, even – and I know this sounds incredibly cruel – no real connection with her own mind or emotions, can a character like this make us laugh? You bet they can. Think of all those stand-up comedians, those masters of self-deprecation who have had us rolling in the aisles at their expense. But, clearly, Batuman doesn’t want to sacrifice her protagonist in this way. Selin, I will be asserting a little later, is far too important a literary experiment or symbol to allow the reader to laugh at her in this manner. But seriously, her dialogue, her interior monologue, her affectless disconnection from just about everything, make of her – unfortunately – not just an idiot but a character who struggles to command our attention, let alone our sympathy. This is beyond naivety, beyond innocence. Selin appears to be an example of what a tram driver once described to me as ‘an educated idiot’. If it wasn’t for that moment in the shower in Hungary when she acknowledges sexual desire for the first time (349), I was beginning to wonder if she was some kind of an android dropped in from an Ishiguro novel, a Klara or a Kathy H who had accidentally migrated from one imaginative universe to another.

         Like someone bamboozled by a piece of modern art, I knew I needed backup: the didactic panel, the ideological statement. At this point I have a further confession to make. My Google search term was this: is there such a thing as a negative review of Elif Batuman’s The Idiot? Happily though, this led me to the discovery of her September 2010 essay in the London Review of Books called ‘Get a Real Degree’. Ostensibly a review of Mark McGurl’s study of the rise and impact of creative writing programs on American writing, Batuman uses the opportunity for a longform examination in which she establishes some markers in terms of her own views on the function and value of literature. Interestingly, the essay was also published midway between her writing of the first draft of The Idiot in 2001 and its eventual publication in 2018.

         Reading this essay, I was in the presence of a writer who not only had something to discuss, something to consider, something to say, I was reading something I truly wanted to read. Neither completely dismissive or utterly sceptical of the contribution of tertiary creative writing programs to the condition of contemporary American literature, she does find both the programs and the literature questionable. Batuman points out, for example, that the two primary exhortations of the programs – ‘write what you know’ and ‘show don’t tell’ – are actually contradictory. Batuman also  performs some incisive surgery on the claims to originality and newness inherent in so many of the tenets and practices of postmodernism, tracing them back not just to Henry James but to Don Quixote. Both Batuman and McGurl locate the emergence of the programs in the immediate post-war Cold War era, Batuman interpreting this in the context of the contest of ideas and values between the US and the Soviet Union. Batuman goes on to consider the kind of managerialist ideology underpinning the courses, their commodification of writing, of the novel and of the novelists graduating from them. Without challenging the value and importance of diversity, Batuman highlights the dialectical process which abandons the study of canonical works in favour of the new, especially if the new arises from a diversity of formerly marginalised voices. In her analysis, the new diversity becomes its own compulsory orthodoxy, ‘an unhappiness-entitlement contest’ through which outsiders become insiders whilst continuing to claim their outsider credentials.

         Batuman is so concerned about this commodification of writing that she draws a distinction between much of the writing now being published in the US and what she still bravely, aesthetically and dialectically describes as ‘literature’. The proliferation of ‘mediocre’ novels with ‘about three genuinely beautiful sentences… one convincing, well-observed character’ and ‘a story that you can’t bring yourself to care about’ comes down, as Batuman admits, to a matter of taste. However, her critique is clear: the creative writing programs have led to a significant increase in productivity, in quantity, not quality. Indeed, Batuman claims that ‘the real work of the novel (the juxtaposition of personal narrative with the facts of the world and the facts of literature) is taking place today largely in memoirs and essays.’ I cannot tell you how alive I felt as a reader and as a writer reading this essay.

         But did it help me understand and appreciate, will it help me enjoy The Idiot? Reading ‘Get a Real Degree’ makes me wonder if The Idiot, in particular Batuman’s disarming(?) / infuriating(?) characterisation of Selin, is a kind of literary experiment? A response, for instance, to the damaging impact of cultural theory on creative practice? Or, is it an attempt at literary reclamation of the mainstream from all those voices simultaneously challenging the mainstream and demanding admittance to it? Perhaps Selin is a kind of tabula rasa intended to get us looking at the world again without the obligatory demands of diversity and cultural theory? What would happen if you wrote about a person living in the world who knows she does not know how the world works, who knows she wants to know by learning through her own experience and – more importantly as it turns out – through her own observation? For more than three-quarters of the novel, Selin does not seem to be able to answer the simplest questions about herself: what does she want, what does she feel, what does she intend to do? Then, all of a sudden – significantly, I think, after the self- and sexual realisation of the shower scene – she can tell her most difficult Hungarian interlocutor, Rózsa: “Truth is okay… But civilization is based on lies.” (360-361) A bombshell dropped by a character from whom we can at the very least learn this: not knowing is no excuse for not observing, not thinking or not learning. What matters in the remaining seventy or so pages of the novel is Selin’s shift from self-abnegation to self-awareness, culminating in her realisation that a year’s study of linguistics and the philosophy and psychology of language has taught her nothing she wanted to know ‘about how language worked’ (423) and her decision to change her major. Cultural theory and postmodernism down, aesthetics and literature up.

         And by a curious diversion, something like three-quarters of my way through this curious river of a novel, I had learned to appreciate Selin’s company and Batuman’s style. Selin is a cypher through which we come to learn that the task of the artist is not to accumulate experience but to practise observation.

Go to ‘Selin Gets Laid!’

Intelligence is unAustralian: Michelle de Kretser’s ‘The Life to Come’

by Adrian D’Ambra

A recent London Review of Books review of Elif Batuman’s first novel, The Idiot (2017), raised the temperature of hope. Here was a writer from inside the academy, steeped in theory, who was prepared to signal its limitations and to celebrate what older readers still lovingly refer to as literary writing. And then I read Michelle de Kretser’s 2017 novel, The Life to Come. At last, a satire on the Australian literary establishment and on the social attitudes, cultural mores and theoretical poses it promotes at the expense of both writing and reading. I haven’t enjoyed an Australian cultural and social literary satire so much since the novels and at least one of the plays – The Season at Sarsaparilla – of Patrick White. And that, I might say breathlessly, is the point. This country couldn’t wait to bury Patrick White. They thought that they hated him because of his upper class Anglo-Australian accent and mannerisms, because he wrote books that were hard to read, because he came from the wealthy rural squattocracy rather than the miserable suburbs that the rest of us grew up in, because of his European sensibilities and his modernism. Possibly even because of his homosexuality. But really, Patrick White was hated for his intelligence; he was hated as a writer because he wrote literature rather than simply novels, short stories, plays; because he insisted that the kind of writing that really mattered was a sounding board for important aesthetic, philosophical, spiritual and psychological questions about art and about being human. Patrick White was hated because every novel also reminded us that we had not built Australia Felix in the Great Southern Land, but that – really – we were nothing more than Little Britain; Little Britain in our shuttered suburban minds, our English language inarticulacy, and – above all else – in our class-divided society. And once he was gone, he was best forgotten if not reviled. After all, ‘Intelligence’, observes Matt, one of de Kretser’s characters, ‘is unAustralian.’ (p. 145)

What de Kretser performs is partly an act of literary resuscitation, something akin to the rehabilitation of political prisoners once convicted of thoughtcrime. She champions Patrick White. She champions Christina Stead. She champions Shirley Hazzard. Stung by her supervisor’s antiseptic, post-structuralist criticism of her thesis, another character, Cassie, writes in her notebook about ‘The Problem with Shirley Hazzard’:

1. She is a woman.
2. She is a great artist.
3. She is fearless.
4. She has stayed away instead of coming home to be punished for 1-3. (p. 61)

De Kretser bravely genders the academic supervisor as a woman to ensure that the criticism levelled at Cassie cannot be read as a sexist attack on her or her subject matter by a male bully.

De Kretser’s novel is also in part an act of literary rebellion against the ideological constraints and the self-imposed insular limitations of the Australian literary establishment. ‘Everything changed in the Eighties,’ explains Pippa, de Kretser’s shadow-novelist, ‘The big division used to be between people who were born before the Second World War and people who were born after. Now it’s between people who know about post-structuralism and the rest of us.’ (p. 129) Ironically, Pippa becomes a commercially successful novelist without having read or being able to understand Foucault. However, her outlook on life and writing is beset by a moral blindness and emotional insensitivity which appears to have been shaped by the cultural landscape in which she operates. Pippa reflects both the sense of cultural inadequacy that comes with being an Australian and the moral and epistemological meaninglessness that comes with absolute relativism. Most of her co-characters have never read an Australian novel. Pippa appears never to have read a European one, let alone any of the world’s other literatures. Her shallowness is sometimes disarming, sometimes potentially deeply offensive to her friends and lovers as well as de Kretser’s readers. As a young writer, she aspires to write with beauty. As a mature writer, she aspires to write the truth. De Kretser allows Pippa’s own postmodern tech-savvy voice to suggest that she has achieved neither. Indeed, another of the significant achievements of the novel is the connection made between the decline in art and meaning and the rise of online inauthenticity.

At the beginning of the novel we are introduced to George Meshaw: ‘In Melbourne . . . he had wanted to write about modernism in Australian fiction for his PhD. After some difficulty, a professor who would admit to having once read an Australian novel was found. At their first meeting, she handed George a reading list made up of French and German philosophers. When George settled down to read these texts, he discovered something astonishing: the meaning of each word was clear and the meaning of sentences baffled. Insignificant yet crucial words like “however” and “which” – words whose meaning was surely beyond dispute – had been deployed in ways that made no sense.’ (p. 5)

De Kretser’s resuscitation of the great Australian modernist novel is much more than an ideological stance. As she did in The Hamilton Case, she writes about characters who are complex, whose relationships with themselves and with each other are complex, sometimes baffling to themselves as well as to the reader. The various narrative threads in her novel – her shifting use of the free indirect style that appears sometimes almost simultaneously to affirm and condemn her characters – are also complex in their development and the connections between them. Existential anxiety is nestled in Pippa’s certainty, George’s resilience, Cassie’s disillusionment, Matt’s entitled sense of self-sacrifice, just as it is nestled in the multitude of familial, intimate, friendship and professional relationships throughout the novel. Revelations constantly collide with misunderstandings. Like the characters in a Chekhov short story or a White novel, great insights can be experienced by utterly ordinary people; hence the lengthy final section of the novel devoted to Christabel and Bunty. De Kretser understands life and writing to exist somewhere between the Chekhovian idyll that ‘We should show life neither as it is, nor as it should be, but as we see it in our dreams’ and Beckett’s dour observation that we, like Christabel, are always awaiting the life to come.