Of all the many bad decisions I’ve made in my life, one of the most baffling was my decision, at seventeen, to go to college in Indiana.
What was going through my mind then? What was I thinking — or was I not thinking at all? I did have a full ride — that played a role in the decision, sure — but it was a real culture shock, going from sunny, cosmopolitan Los Angeles to a tiny university in a tiny college town, where students walked around wearing shapeless khakis and fleeces and corduroy pants, by choice. There was absolutely nothing to do there except get drunk at frat parties, which is basically what I did — for three years! Such parties are not as fun as they make them out to be in the movies. I escaped a year early by doing an extended internship at a public relations company in New York to earn the last credits I needed for my degree. I never went back, not even for the graduation ceremony.
Even now, when I talk to my college friend Anne, we often find ourselves asking each other, incredulous: “But WHY did we go THERE?”
Which is to say, reading Elif Batuman’s The Idiot (Penguin, 2017), I found myself growing wistful for the college experience I never had. The Idiot follows a young woman called Selin through her first year at Harvard, where she signs up for a random assortment of classes and develops a gigantic crush on a senior called Ivan, who already has a girlfriend and never really makes a move on Selin. This isn’t a sexual coming of age novel. In fact, there’s no sex at all! No big parties either, or much drinking. Mostly, Selin reads and writes and hangs out with her friends. And she obsesses about Ivan, musing about things, like this:
“I kept thinking about the uneven quality of time — the way it was almost always so empty, and then with no warning came a few days that felt so dense and alive and real that it seemed indisputable that that was what life was, that its real nature had finally been revealed. But then time passed and unthinkably grew dead again, and it turned out that that fullness had been an aberration and might never come back.”
And yet in all that so-called emptiness, so much happens, if mostly in the life of the mind. Selin’s strange relationship with Ivan begins when they’re paired together in Russian class to practice the language by pretending to be characters in a story they’d just read. Later, on a whim, Selin sends an email to Ivan, in the voice of her Russian character, and a correspondence begins. Soon, they start emailing each other philosophical musings on language and stars and time.
The “relationship,” if you can really call it that, doesn’t actually go anywhere, though the two do end up spending quite a lot of time together, going for drinks and swims and walks. There’s really nowhere for the relationship to go. Ivan even says explicitly he shouldn’t be stringing her along — He has a girlfriend, after all.
What I love about this novel is the question it brings up about agency. Are we decisive actors in our lives, making things happen? Or do things just happen to us? There’s an aspect to Selin that seems incredibly passive. She lets herself get dragged into things — a friend’s tae kwon do class, little excursions, conversations she’s not particularly interested in having. In fact, Selin doesn’t decide to teach in Hungary so much as just end up in that teaching program. Ivan tells her about it, so she finds herself at the orientation meeting, and then the next thing she knows she’s in the Hungarian countryside, teaching Beatles songs to a motley group of students.
Yet what is determination, really, if not the decision to follow your crush halfway around the world? Isn’t that basically the definition of following your desire? She did send the first enigmatic email, after all —
What The Idiot does really well is capture the porousness of youth, that time when anything and everything feels like it could be significant, momentous, whether it’s listening to records or waiting for a phone call or reading Dracula, that time when the potent cocktail of emotions you feel hit you so urgently you think might crawl out of your skin if something doesn’t happen, right this second!
Though really, does that time ever truly end?
“I hadn’t learned anything at all,” reads the last line of The Idiot, though the message of the book, if I can call it that, is the opposite. The epigraph is a quote from Proust, who praises the “ridiculous age” of adolescence when we do silly, regrettable things as “the only period in which we learn anything.”
And throughout, Selin does learn — about life, and longing, and love. When her friend Svetlana develops a crush on a not-particularly-impressive guy, Selin muses, “wasn’t that itself the miracle — that love really was an obscure and unfathomable connection between individuals, and not an economic contest where everyone was matched up according to how quantifiably lovable they were?”
That’s one lesson that took me a long time to learn; I learned it well after college. Surely I learned other things in Indiana — though I do still wonder sometimes if I really had to go through three years of life in the Midwest to learn that I never want to do anything like that again.
Maybe to some degree, those years helped me learn that a life of reading and writing and having conversations with people who cross my path might, in itself, be enough, that that, in itself, might be life. No need to actively try and make anything happen, no need to worry about what to do or who I might become, no need seek out the momentous parties or dramatic affairs or life-changing experiences, as whatever experiences I have, they’ll inevitably be life-changing anyway.
Maybe all I need to do is openly throw myself into whatever comes my way. The Idiot makes me want to do that, even as I fear that was the kind of thinking that took me to Indiana in the first place —