There are mica-glints of beauty everywhere in it, the author's voice eccentric, funny, enormously intelligent. At once a cutting satire of academia, a fresh take on the epistolary novel, a poignant bildungsroman, and compelling travel literature, The Idiot is also a touching and spirited portrait of the artist as a hugely appealing young woman. But Selin is such good company that we easily forgive any formal lapses.

It also peters out rather unsatisfactorily. The Idiot is told in short, largely self-contained segments, a tactic that makes for sharp, well-defined scenes but sometimes undermines the novel’s flow, coherence, and elegance. We have snoring roommates, fajita night in the cafeteria, meet-ups for frozen yogurt, CARE packages from parents, halogen lamps, black Jersey clothes from the Gap, fake IDs. Albert Einstein, REM, and Ansel Adams posters, Edward Gorey and Klimt prints abound. Batuman nails the details of mid-1990s college life. Moreover, parts of The Idiot replicate almost verbatim sections from essays in The Possessed. Very tall, with an unusual face, a Turkish-American girl who grew up in New Jersey, attends Harvard, and aspires to be a writer, Selin is clearly a stand-in for Batuman. How you write is how you will be read.'” Read Full Review > Dear young writers, write with dignity, not in guilt. Do not be ashamed to grieve about personal things. In The Idiot, she has heeded the rallying cry she issued in n+1: 'Write long novels, pointless novels. Her compassion for the agony of those attempting to forge a connection through words is perceptive, intelligent, and funny. Batuman is virtuosic in articulating the internal workings of this moment. As idiosyncratic Hungarians continue to materialize, it begins to feel as though Batuman is giving us an object lesson in distinguishing between the tastefully modest craft of fiction and the ungainly ambition of literature. But this integration isn’t simply an intellectual process it’s what happens in all coming-of-age stories. In Batuman’s view, integrating the new and the familiar, the personal and the canonical, is precisely what the novel ought to do.

A loose, baggy monster, full of irrelevant garbage and needless words - and all the richer for it - the book implicitly makes an argument for what a twenty-first-century novel might be.

The idiot book elif