In the beginning Russian course, the narrator meets Ivan, an older Hungarian student of mathematics. The medium of email meshes with each of these disciplines and with the exciting and overwhelming ideas Selin encounters. She takes another class called Constructed Worlds she enters and wins the undergraduate fiction contest. Selin is fascinated by language and takes courses in Russian, linguistics, and philosophy of language. The novel opens in the fall of 1995, and email is present in its first sentence: “I didn’t know what email was until I got to college.” The narrator, like the author, is a Turkish-American woman who enrolls at Harvard. The Idiot incorporates a boundary-redrawing method of communication-email, that purveyor of garbage-into its structure. Reading the Best American Short Stories anthologies of 20, she writes that, almost without exception, the stories have been “pared down to a nearly unreadable core of brisk verbs and vivid nouns” that is “celebrated as ‘lean,’ ‘tight,’ ‘well-honed’ prose.” The novel, on the other hand, “consists of all the irrelevant garbage, the effort to redeem that garbage, to integrate it into Life Itself, to redraw the boundaries of Life Itself.” In 2017, with the publication of The Idiot, Batuman gives us a version of this novel. In the Spring 2006 issue of n+1, Elif Batuman makes the case for what the novel should do.
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