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?’

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.

The Plenitude of Life Itself

by Adrian D’Ambra

Samuel Beckett – Not to want to say, not to know what you want to say, not to be able to say what you think you want to say, and never to stop saying, or hardly ever, that is the thing to keep in mind, even in the heat of composition. – Molloy (1951/1955), 2009 Faber and Faber edition, p 25

Samuel Beckett – You invent nothing, you think you are inventing, you think you are escaping, and all you do is stammer out your lesson, the remnants of a pensum one day got by heart and long forgotten, life without tears, as it is wept. – Molloy (1951/1955), 2009 Faber and Faber edition, p 29

In the space of four pages Beckett takes us from optimism to pessimism, from purpose to pointlessness, from provisional hope to blank despair. But in the midst of this there is room, even in Beckett, for the plenitude of life itself: Earth’s diurnal round of sunrise and sunset observed across fields, towns, streets, seas; the light and dark of daytime and night-time life; the plethora of human situations repeated and repeatedly enjoyed, indulged, observed, someone walks a dog again and again and again, someone else appears in the distance, just far enough away for you to not be sure if they are approaching or withdrawing; rain falls, sun dries, light shines, night glows. Is this also not what we discover watching what Lear discovers in the storm, that humankind and human life is simultaneously both no more than this and all of this?

* * *

The soundtrack accompaniment to these thoughts on Beckett and the plenitude of life is undoubtedly the last two songs from Bowie’s ‘Blackstar’ album, ‘Dollar Days’ and ‘I Can’t Give Everything Away’. In these two songs Bowie simultaneously evokes the wonderment of life and the awareness of mortality; that having witnessed everything, having lived in attachment to all that surrounds us, we must also leave it behind, entering and becoming nothingness. The shuffled paper and heavy breathing at the beginning of ‘Dollar Days’ owe an ever so tiny something to the aural landscape of Kendrick Lamar’s excoriating black paranoia survivor guilt, his finnegans wake of the tortured nightmare soul, ‘To Pimp a Butterfly’. Bowie’s song has its own survivor’s despair, the cancer patient’s evocation of ‘survival sex’ and unrelenting forgetfulness. Looking at the world of men he sees the ‘Oligarchs with foaming mouths’ but looking into himself he sees in memory what he will not see again in life: ‘If I never see the English evergreens I’m running to / It’s nothing to me / It’s nothing to see’. What he will do and what he is in fact doing in the composition and performance of the song is to continue his aesthetic intention to the end: ‘I’m dying to / Push their backs against the grain / And fool them all again and again / I’m trying to’. Like Beckett’s Molloy he can’t go on, he must go on. ‘I Can’t Give Everything Away’, the closing song on Bowie’s final album, is sung with exceptional beauty in a sound landscape that is very reminiscent of the album ‘Hours’ from 1999. How well he sings and how well it reads as the coda to an extraordinary career and as a testament to his own aesthetic integrity: ‘Seeing more and feeling less / Saying no but meaning yes / This is all I ever meant / That’s the message that I sent / I can’t give everything away’. Listen.

Can, Should, Must We Turn Away?

by Adrian D’Ambra

Samuel Beckett – ‘From things about to disappear I turn away in time.’ – Molloy (1951/1955), 2009 Faber and Faber edition, pp 8-9

But can we? Should we? Must we? Everything around us is always about to disappear: behind us; before us; in time; in space; in sleep; in darkness; in daylight; in regret. But must, can should we turn away? Should we turn away, for example, from the injustices performed in our name such as the incarceration and mistreatment of asylum seekers in offshore detention centres? Or, should we turn away from those other injustices that we know the name of but do not choose to question?

What happens, for instance, when you take this eloquent and lyrical meditation from Beckett and place it alongside this eloquent and lyrical contemplation from Gharda Karmi:

‘I knew there were formidable practical difficulties in the way of our return, an aim that seemed ever more unattainable with the passage of time. But I was determined that Israel should never be allowed to get away with what it had done. Despite the resignation and defeatism of the Palestinian official stance and the indifference and cynicism I saw amongst many Palestinians around me, I never once doubted the rightness of my position, or that the crime committed against us in 1948 would somehow be redressed. I could not have lived with myself if I had thought differently. Such an injustice could not be allowed to stand for good, and the perpetrators would sooner or later have to give up their gains. The Palestinian refugee camps which still stood after more than half a century, not one of them ever closed down, bore eloquent testimony to an unfinished business that would have to find its proper conclusion.’ – Return, A Palestinian Memoir (2015), p 315

Can, should, must we turn away?

Nothing but Nothingness: Beckett, Lamar, Bowie

by Adrian D’Ambra

Samuel Beckett:

What do we expect from Beckett? Existential anxiety? The indignity of experience? A nihilism in which there is nothing but nothingness at the centre of human life? Meaninglessness? Novels without narratives, plays in which nothing happens? Psychological disorder? Mendacity? Selfishness? Ourselves stripped bare to moral and physical nakedness?

And yet, expectation can also limit our appreciation, our understanding.

What of the humour?

More importantly, what of the fact that the pages are not empty, that the apparent nothingness has a voice, voices? And that the voices have expression? Language. Beckett uses language to identify, to circumscribe, the unnameable.

Language. Voice. Being.

So much more than meaning, method, objective.

Kendrick Lamar:

The lyrical assault weapons deployed by Kendrick Lamar on ‘To Pimp a Butterfly’ are confronting and nihilistic. Here is the history of American slavery as it persists through time from the shores of Africa to the latest shooting. Here is anarchy and hopelessness.

Anger. Frustration. Revolution.

Revulsion at the way things are for people of colour. And yet, it is dressed in the finest instrumentation and musical arrangement imaginable, making it also a thing of:

Art. Defiance. Beauty. The language of hatred itself becomes lyrical in his hands.

David Bowie:

As a dear friend of mine said to me the other night, it is impossible now to listen to the ‘Blackstar’ album outside the context of David Bowie’s death. Inversely, we have also been invited to read the slow process of that inevitable death through ‘Blackstar’. It is impossible for me to listen to these lyrics without hearing within them the history of a definitive diagnosis and a doomed treatment. Anyone who has been treated for a terminal illness or cared for someone else in that situation can recognise the words.

Motifs. Feelings. Doubts.

‘Where the fuck did Monday go?’ Where, indeed? What loss, what an accumulation of losses and of castings-off is such an experience.

Postscript: For castings-off I am reminded of Linda Loman in Arthur Miller’s ‘Death of a Salesman’.