Arts Vanity: I Am ‘The Idiot’

In 2023, I became convinced that my life was exactly like “The Idiot” by Elif Batuman ’99. Some book lovers choose to identify with witty Austenian heroines, Joycean everymen, or tortured Russian nobility. I choose to identify with exactly who I very recently was: a 19-year-old daughter of immigrants studying literature at Harvard. This may seem lazy and uncreative, but it is actually a cosmically singular affinity to rival any other instance of anyone relating to any fictional character. Ever.

Not to be confused with Dostoevsky’s novel of the same name, “The Idiot” was published in 2017. I first read it as my freshman summer drew to a close, on a plane passing over Hungary, which is incidentally when and where narrator Selin’s own story concludes (cosmic forces, anyone?). The central thread of the novel is Selin’s romantic email exchange with older linguistics classmate Ivan, but enfolding that is a year in the life — freshman year, to be exact — of a young woman obsessed with literature. Accordingly, she longs for meaning and coherence of the literary kind in her own life and studies, occasionally despairing about her lack of interesting experiences or her inability to understand the things around her.

In the two years since then, I have developed both a “The Idiot” lexicon and paraphernalia of sorts. A common exchange with my friends: “You know what this reminds me of?” “The Idiot.” I have made a Venn diagram comparing “The Idiot” to my own life, narrativized my memories in the style of “The Idiot,” compared every new novel I read to “The Idiot.”

There is no unassuming line, no passage about a completely undramatic experience, that hasn’t been memorized and indexed to some niche experience in my life. It would be futile to explain why I relate so much to “The Idiot” — the answers are every one of the thousands of passages that make up Selin’s interior life. It’s not just the accuracy, it’s the sheer volume. But here: I cannot resist mentioning the way the novel lingers on the tenderness one feels for strangers, the betrayal of being shared with others, the ability to fall in love with philosophical emails, the inability to make conversation, and — case in point — the sense of awe at some cryptically trivial correspondence of one’s life with art.

These passages live in my heart; they also tend toward the opaque, fleeting, or hyper-specific, such that many open the Pulitzer-finalist novel only to judge it tedious. How can I explain why I’m so fixated on the semantics of “the traffic light changes back and forth, like my heart,” or the notion of poets as “liars, obsessed with cereal”? How can I explain why I’m so charmed by Selin’s aversion to others thinking that she thinks her own writing is good, or her gloom over never having “done anything or gone anywhere”?

The answer is, of course, that this hyper-specificity is intended for me personally. The linchpin of my obsession lies in the following synchronicity. When I commenced reading sophomore saga “Either/Or,” I found out that Selin went on to do exactly what I had been doing: becoming really convinced that her life was just like this book she was reading.

In my weekly ritual of flipping through the pages of Selin’s story, the scenes really do summon my own memories. Selin’s time teaching English to Hungarian villagers evokes my mismatched yet sincere encounters with strangers in corners of China, her epiphany that Ivan could be studying the possibility of math explaining “not just physics but everything” recalls a long plane conversation I once had about the beauty of pure math, her disappointment when Ivan wants to see someone trip and fall references my own minor disillusionment with someone whose intellectual depth, I thought, would predicate ethical carefulness. In the end, I feel like what “The Idiot” is saying is just this: Life — all those little strange and tender moments in the life of a young woman — is already interesting, already worth writing about, despite our strivings to become somebody worth writing about.

I now realize, of course, that a core part of Selin’s naivete lies in her wanting her life to be just like her favorite books. But when the creative result, as it is implied, is a novel such as “The Idiot,” I cannot let go of my own “Idiot”-esque frame of mind. Like Selin realizes, I was born creatively limited: I can only write about my own life, which will probably culminate in a really long Google Doc of diaristic vignettes interesting only to myself. But if this constant self-narrativizing can make everything beautiful and interesting and funny, so be it. I am “The Idiot.” The idiot is me.

—Like Selin, outgoing Arts Chair Isabelle A. Lu spent these last few years making up interesting things to say. She can be emailed about Siberia, the seduction of the atom, or the triviality-dungeon of conversations at [email protected].