The Idiot

By Elif Batuman, Penguin Random House, 2017, 423 pages
Reviewed by Jim Satsiowski, May 23, 2021

Poker wisdom: At the table, if I cannot tell who the sucker is, I am the sucker.

Literary wisdom: I just paid $17 for a novel called “The Idiot,” and all of the characters are so lame, I cannot tell which one the title is describing.

Yep. I am the punch line.

I buy books based on reviews in The New York Times, in The Wall Street Journal, even on the defaced walls of public restrooms. I bought “The Idiot” because of positive reviews, and just to be clear, the front cover and back cover have glowing blurbs about it, and that doesn’t even take into account the four full pages of glowing blurbs that precede the title page. There’s so much glowing, I wondered if it might be a follow-up to Chernobyl.

No. It’s the tale of the first-person narrator, Selin Hanim, a bright – source of that glow? – 18-year-old Harvard freshman who grew up in New Jersey, the daughter of Turkish immigrants.

One of the blurbs – yeah, hold you horses, I’ll get to the story in a minute – reads: “Easily the funniest book I’ve read this year.” OK, well, define “this year.”

Then, two other blurbers – “burblers?” – used words that should require warning labels like those on cigarette packs: “mordant” and “dry,” referring to the humor. Isn’t “mordant wit” an oxymoron? You know what “mordant” is derived from? The same Latin roots as “morbid.”

And “dry?” “Dry wit” usually means: “Well, you may not get it the first time you read it, or the second time or third, but when you’re brushing your teeth that night, you’ll realize it was intended to be funny.”

Yeah. I like my “funny” to be immediate, like heroin.

Now, as for “The Idiot”: It is 1995, as the story opens, and Selin is just arriving at Harvard. She is a virgin, she doesn’t know anything about email, and she doesn’t drink. Did I mention she is from New Jersey? It must be the part of New Jersey that is connected to neither the continental United States nor reality.

Right away, Selin is annoying. She starts her novel-long practice of instantaneously judging people. Slyly, she doesn’t flat-out say, “So-and-so is (bleep),” but she uses descriptions that make clear her disdain. She has two roommates, Angela and Hannah, for a suite that has one private bedroom and one with a bunkbed. In flat language masquerading as non-judgmental, Selin says that Angela, without a word to the other two, grabbed the private bedroom for herself. (Translation: Angela is self-absorbed.) Hannah buys a refrigerator for the common space, then insists that Selin may use the refrigerator only if she buys a poster of Albert Einstein for the wall, which Selin dutifully does. (Translation: Hannah is overbearing.)

Characters don’t actually develop; they merely confirm Selin’s first impressions, branded like cattle. But Batuman, recognizing she’s turning her protagonist into a snob, gives Selin compensatory quirks of her own: Selin lets others push her around, occasionally calls herself an “idiot” – that may or may not be a clue to my opening query – falls in love with Ivan, who toys with her and who himself also does idiotic things, such as revealing to Selin he is tempted to throw a dog into the Danube. (The opposite of dry wit, perhaps?)

In many ways, “The Idiot” reminds me of “The Marriage Plot,” Jeffrey Eugenides’ blurb-basted 2011 novel that I barbecued almost a year ago. Both are about young women, college, complications, international travel and way too much mundane action followed by way too much rambling thinking. Both authors, but especially Batuman, appear to ache for blurbs that would include comparisons to James Joyce, the Irish writer bizarrely famous for “Ulysses,” which itself is bizarrely famous as an interminable ode to brain-drooling.

From “The Idiot,” here’s a paragraph undiluted from the brain of Selin as she and Ivan visit the historic city of Szentendre, Hungary:

The church interior smelled unmistakably of church interior. An artists’ colony had painted frescoes in the choir. Christ and the apostles were sitting in rows, staring straight ahead, with highly specific, human-looking faces. They looked like some guys you might see while returning to your seat from the airplane lavatory.

A few thousand more paragraphs of such clunk, and the Joyce comparisons would have overblurbed.

(Returning from most airplane lavatories, I see only the backs of passengers’ heads, unless I am spontaneously honking.)

I’ve been a relentless critic of The Modern Novel trend toward zero action except in the mind. In “The Idiot,” the exterior action is present, but it is devoted to such things as going to a movie or paddling a kayak. Nothing really happens – hey, I’m not demanding bestiality or armed robbery, but is it asking too much for some “Idiot” character to at least buy a gun? – so there are no turning points or even weird coincidences that make me say aloud, “Geez.”

Batuman is not an unskilled humorist. Illustrating the character of non-sequitur-prone Ivan, she allows Selin this delicious delivery: Ivan wrote to me about clowns. He said that we had forgotten the clowns, who now performed only in prisons and insane asylums. The implication was that this was a bad thing.

That’s funny, but funnier still is that Selin, smart enough to get into Harvard, falls unsmartly in love with someone whose wooing technique includes an update, of dubious accuracy, on clown culture.

One benefit of the book: I finally know what generation to blame for the universal obsession with diluting every statement. Batuman was born in 1977, and I won’t try to classify her properly as Gen X, Millennial or mere Knucklehead. (In my case, such labels bring on seizures.) But she clearly was involved in (although probably not directly responsible for) the tendency to place “almost” or “sort of” or “kind of” in front of every description.

Describing a powerful downpour, she wrote: The umbrella became a sort of visual joke.

It’s as if I’m watching cable-TV news, in which every commentator calls things, “sort of a revolution,” or, “kind of a wasted opportunity.” The line, “The umbrella became a visual joke” may not be funny or inspired prose, but at least I can be rid of it two syllables sooner.

Later in “The Idiot”: The trees that scrolled past were a vivid, almost plastic green. … Her remarkable eyes – pink-rimmed, gray, almost quivering – were magnified by thick glasses. … The lifters’ bodies looked almost green.

(Quite a talent, to control the optic nerves so effectively as to signal repressed quiver.)

Although I deplore the insidious infestation of “almost” and “sort of,” in this case, it fits the plot of “The Idiot.” Selin is sort of in love with Ivan, and they kind of kiss, almost have sex, almost …, well, if I continue, I’ll become the reviewer’s nightmare: a spoiler. I’ll just say that when anything happens, whether wise or silly, it seems heavy with portent, but turns out more poor than tent.

Storytelling, no matter how witty, shouldn’t be all build-up, no climax. “The Idiot” isn’t bad, just unfulfilling. Sort of.