Just Do It

The Idiot a novel by Elif Batuman.  A Penguin Book.  423 pp.  $17.00. ***1/2

Holy God, as a friend used to say[1], am I glad I went to college when I did.  It was a difficult moment in this country’s history, the Vietnam war raging, a decent grade point average the only thing between me and a hail of artillery shells.  I think it was the anxiety of facing all that that led people into some of their more outrageous behaviors, and that drove us (to speak more specifically) into each other’s arms.  When I arrived at Duke University, we were given solemn instructions that, if we had a female in our dorm room, and we didn’t leave the door absolutely wide open, we would be subject to expulsion.  Such visits could only occur on occasional Saturdays, called “open opens” (the dorm was open to women, and your door was open to the authorities, something like that).  The person who delivered this news—my freshman advisor—definitely believed it, and so did the solemn-faced freshmen who took in the news.  Close that door even a little and you might be outta here.  A one-way ticket to Viet Nam.

Two years later I spent hours every Friday and Saturday night in bed with my girlfriend (a wonderful way to counteract the pervasive anxiety), and we definitely didn’t leave the door open.  She had to be in her dorm by 2:00, so we clambered out of bed at 1:40 and got dressed, I drove her back in her car, then drove the car back so I could get a little sleep before I woke up and drove over to have lunch with her.  One evening we popped out of the room to be greeted by the dorm’s resident advisor, who lived across the hall, the man who was supposed to turn us in.  We gave him a cordial hello, and he greeted us right back.  At that point (the fall of 1968, with two major political assassinations behind us), the rules hadn’t changed, but if that guy had ratted on us he would have been ridden out of town on a rail.  The times they were a changin’.  The rules hadn’t caught up.

(I can still remember that resident advisor joining me in the dining hall for breakfast one morning.  He was a law student and a Republican, had already served in the military.  He assured me that “this Vietnam thing” couldn’t last much longer, and that I shouldn’t be worried about it.  Elect Nixon, in other words.  I wasn’t buying it.  The war lasted for another five years, plenty of time to go over there and get my brains blown out.)

Fast forward to 1995, when Elif Bautman was in college, also the protagonist of her novel (one suspects that these two people are one and the same, though this book is officially a novel, and I’m sure she’s taken liberties with what really happened.  Otherwise why be a novelist?).  Selin is the daughter of Turkish immigrants, though she has grown up in this country.  Her best friend, Svetlana, is Serbian, and Selin herself is much taken with a senior named Ivan, who at the end of the year is headed to Budapest while Selin herself heads off to teach English in the Hungarian countryside.  (Rather more glamorous options that we had in the sixties.  I worked in a factory near my house in Pittsburgh.)  Email is a new phenomenon in this era, and Selin begins her romance with Ivan via email, a rather odd thing to do when you’re both on the same campus.  We as readers have the opportunity to examine these e-mails and see what’s up.

I tend to love campus novels.  Those were intense years for me, and I enjoy seeing what other people made of them, even people much younger than I.  (It wasn’t too much after ’95 that I began working with Duke students, undergrads first, later grad students.)  I especially like that whole idea of coming of age, the intellectual world opening up for you, the glimmerings of what you want to do with your life.  It’s that moment of great promise (before the world starts to close in and you start to make compromises[2]).

These young people are much smarter than I was.  (They’re at Harvard!)  They’re reading works of literature in a night or two that I’d barely heard of when I was in college, and that would have taken me a week to read.  They’re also far more sophisticated than I, and have traveled more at their age than I have in my whole lifetime.  They’d probably meet me right now and think, this poor old fart.  What did he do with his life?

But honestly, these people seem emotionally constipated beyond belief.  Selin is in love with Ivan, and he’s at least quite taken with her.  There are rumors that he has another girlfriend, but he doesn’t seem terribly attached to her; he has plenty of time to be with Selin.  And in the whole of this novel, Selin and Ivan not only don’t fuck, they don’t so much as kiss.  The height of passion is when they exchange a long hug toward the end of the book.  What if he does have another girlfriend, I want to say. You’re smart, you’re pretty, you’re eighteen years old. You have 423 pages to work with. What are you waiting for?

Batuman is much taken with the work of Dostoyevsky, hence the title (she has another book entitled The Possessed, though it is apparently a work of nonfiction).  I’m not sure the title is intended to apply to Selin, but she’s certainly a good candidate.  I often feel I don’t understand young people (you’d rather write a clever e-mail than actually see the guy?), and this novel is Exhibit A.  The book is beautifully and cleverly written, and has a huge following.  (There’s actually a sequel, about her sophomore year!)  I thought it was the most frustrating novel since Tristram Shandy.

The college years are supposed to be passionate, aren’t they?  What happened?

[1] Irv, at Frank Men’s Wear, Squirrel Hill, PA, circa 1970.

[2] I used to think Don Quixote was a comedy about a crazy old man.  Later I realized it’s a parable of everyone’s life.