Category: American Literature

Vladimir Nabokov – Pale Fire

Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire is an extraordinary work of fiction and at points probably the most fun I’ve had reading in a long while. It is also a great challenge to your blogger qua blogger. Should you take a (spoiling) glance at Wikipedia you would see that some of the major critical questions surrounding the work concern whether half of the cast of characters even exist within its world, or whether they are instead the ravings of the probable madman who is our narrator. When I write about literature I try to grasp onto what is solid – I focus, as this blog’s name suggests, upon stories. Here, therefore, I have my work cut out for me with all this confusion. Or I would, if the work did not at the same time contain such a holistic richness, where language, form, structure, and apparent plot, work together to deliver ideas and thoughts with the maximum impact, that there remains plenty to say.

With Pale Fire the challenge of writing about it comes not only from an atmosphere of uncertainty, but also from the very structure of the work. I write long-ish blog posts, but I try to spare readers whole monographs. Yet Pale Fire contains multitudes. It is not only a poem of 999 lines in rhyming couplets by a murdered author. It is also accompanied by foreword and commentary and index by another man, one who claims to be friends with the author, and whose commentary, besides being some five times the length of the author’s work, also seems to be as much an adventure story as attempt at close analysis. It is a confession, a tale of daring escape, and an academic satire, even before we try to think about its relation to the poem itself.

Even working out how to read the book is a choice and challenge. In the “Foreword”, Charles Kinbote, our guide and colleague of the deceased poet John Shade at an American university, describes how we are best to read Pale Fire. First, he tells us, we read his commentary, and only then do we read the poem with the notes, before we finally read the notes a third time on their own again. I ignored this bizarre suggestion and read the poem first, then put the book down for a month, then read the poem again, before reading the commentary in isolation afterwards. Such an approach I think makes sense, because in essence Pale Fire is two stories in contention – the poem and Shade’s narration fight the tale and narration of Kinbote in his critical apparatus, where Kinbote is actively trying to control our understanding of the former.

Here I’ll begin with the poem, then the commentary, and try to suggest how they fit together.

Poem

Pale Fire is a poem of 999 lines, broken into a mirrored four-canto structure (166-334-334-165) with the last line remaining unwritten at the time of John Shade’s murder. It is rhymed throughout in heroic couplets (AABB etc, iambic pentameter), which provides an ironic contrast with the relative mundanity of its autobiographical contents. (Here I should note that I am assuming Shade is telling the truth, that his narrator is himself, rather than some distanced figure, which is not really something one is normally supposed to do with poems these days). John Shade describes topics like his early life, his family and his views on life after death. At its centre lie his love for his wife and his grief over his daughter’s death by suicide.

Probably the most sensible critical approach to the book as a whole is to see it as showing the interplay of reflection and masking, self and other. Hence the two sides of the work, Shade and Kinbote, the mirrored structure of the poem, and plenty besides. In the poem, Shade shows more ambivalence to the topic of reflection and deception than his editor. “I was the shadow of the waxwing slain / By the false azure in the windowpane”, the poem’s first couplet, describes the death of a bird from a false assumption regarding transparency. In trying to recover the memory of his parents, who died young, Shade can only create shadowy images that have no substance – many reflections, but not the real thing. Shade’s poem shows him holding on to a sense of the real which poetic reality disappoints, at least to begin with.

Disappointment and pessimism come across elsewhere in the poem too. Madness stalks Shade, even before we get into the “outside” world of Kinbote, such as through the figure of his Aunt Maud, who suffers from dementia and can speak, but never find the right words. The greatest cause for sadness, however, is his daughter Hazel, whose ugliness and ungainliness seem to curse her to her early doom (“no lips would share the lipstick of her smoke”), and who on the night of her death is betrayed cruelly by a date. But it is here, unlike with his parents, Shade succeeds in recreating his daughter’s life. Poetry helps him to build a parallel image to his experience of her final evening as he watches television and waits for her to come home, one where he imagines her final moments. And this allows the positive couplet in Canto 4, where “I’m reasonably sure that we survive / and that my darling somewhere is alive”.

While the poem is a place of unsatisfactory reflections, that is far from the whole story, as his eventual hope for Hazel shows. Its most moving passages are when the poet does strike out in love and successfully grasps on to his object:

And I'll turn down eternity unless
The melancholy and the tenderness
Of mortal life; the passion and the pain;
The claret taillight of that dwindling plane
Off Hesperus; your gesture of dismay
On running out of cigarettes; the way
You smile at dogs; the trail of silver slime
Snails leave on flagstones; this good ink, this rhyme,
This index card, this slender rubber band
Which always forms, when dropped, an ampersand,
Are found in Heaven by the newly dead
Stored in its strongholds through the years. 

This might, to an expert, be bad poetry. I find it moving. It’s a dance in time and reference between mundanity and the heavenly. And whereas pessimism might have lines supporting it elsewhere, here we have anything but that. It is not resignation in the face of the world – note the active verb “I’ll turn down”, and words like “passion” and “pain” which speak of emotions not blunted by the hardships of life. While Nabokov’s work is filled with irony – Shade expresses hope about waking up on the 22nd July as normal but in real life he is shot and never sees the day) – the poem, taken as Shade’s testimony, is free of this. Instead, it is connection, which indeed is the other value of the couplet structure – the iron bond of rhyme that links each line to line. Couplets might be humorous in essence, but sometimes we need them.

If I were to try to sum up the poem, then, which is difficult because as with all poetry it’s unfairly dense and could handle a much deeper analysis than what I’ve provided, I would say this: in a world of distorting and uncertain reflections and pain, through focused love towards those nearest him – his wife and daughter – Shade manages to create a work that ends with hope.

Solus Rex

The novel Pale Fire takes its name from the poem, Pale Fire, but it could easily have had another title – Solus Rex. This is the title that our commentator, Charles Kinbote, admits he would have given it. Kinbote is a larger-than-life figure, a madman in the Nabokovian mould. He is many things, and possibly none of them – a professor, an exiled king, a menace to his students and his colleagues, and an inveterate inventor of fictions. He claims to be protecting Shade’s legacy by publishing his poem, but then admits that Shade’s wife Sybil refuses to answer his letters, and he speaks of himself as of a man in flight from dangerous pursuers – he refuses to go to a library to check anything and is writing his notes in a remote log cabin.

His commentary is as multiple as he is. The one thing it is not is good academic criticism. Kinbote states the obvious and calls it analysis with the same brazenness as a certain blogger; at other times he simply refuses to do his job altogether – “my readers must do their own research” he declares. His index cheerily damns his colleagues by mentioning them in their connection with Shade and then noting “Not in the index” to show they aren’t worth any further consideration. In places his interpretations are so bizarrely off the mark that I found myself writing things like “no, I don’t think so”, in the margins. Towards the end of the book, faced with a momentary upsurge of academic integrity, he admits that a fair few of Shade’s “discarded drafts” were lines he simply made up. It would be a shock, except that his attempts don’t even manage to mimic the iambic pentameter correctly. No great poet, this editor.

All this, however, is secondary to the real part of the commentary – Kinbote’s description of his own life as exiled king of the north-European country of Zembla. More than academic score-setting, this is the reason for his notes’ existence. Kinbote believed that, over the course of his short “friendship” with Shade, he had convinced him to write this story as his poem. Shocked to discover that “Pale Fire” has nothing to do with this, Kinbote first attempts analytical pirouettes to find connections, then abandons the attempt, leaving the commentary an almost-standalone narrative of the life of Charles “the Beloved” of Zembla, from boyhood sexual escapades to the revolution that forces him to undertake a daring escape into exile. How much of any of this is true is the big academic question, indeed whether Zembla exists within the story to begin with.

Throughout, there are clues towards deeper truths, hints scattered among the pages. Kinbote is a lover of masks and subterfuge, unlike Shade – indeed, “King Charles” fled Zembla with the help of a disguise. Whereas in the poem, Shade tries to define the truths of his life among the many reflections and distortions of it, Kinbote’s section almost seems an attempt at the opposite – a befuddling of the truth which, somehow, still pokes out here and there. The reason why this works is that Kinbote has a certain amount of conscience, as mentioned above. He would prefer to omit than to lie outright, and sometimes he fails to omit things. Hence the occasional allusions to sexual misbehaviour, such as “his penetrating into the bedroom where his friend sat and shaved in the tub”, which is an index entry under his own name. Hence also the hints that his friendship with the Shades is not exactly all he claims it is. For example, regarding dinner parties he notes that “of the dozen or so invitations that I extended, the Shades accepted just three”. Then there is his reported speech to Sybil on one occasion, which begins as a benign monologue, only to be increasingly sullied with phrases like “do not interrupt me”, or “let me speak”, all within one long run-on sentence, as if he hopes we will not notice.

The two together

“Pale Fire”, the poem, has been published separately. The commentary, to a certain extent, could be too. What then, is the purpose of their cohabitation in one book, beyond merely providing the scaffolding for some academic satire? The treatment of grief within the work is what led me onto my own answer. Shade and his wife grieve the loss of their daughter. Those other poems of Shade’s which Kinbote quotes in the commentary all mourn for her too, directly or less so. His long poem itself is, at its heart, a working out of that grief, a transition from pessimism to hope for the future.

Kinbote’s relation to grief is entirely different. The high point of Shade’s grief within the poem he criticises as stylistically weak (“too laboured and too long”), then he steals the manuscript, convincing a weeping Sybil Shade on the day of her husband’s death that he ought to be the one to edit and publish his last poem.

Stepping back, then, we have two kinds of interaction. Kinbote scorns reality and is obsessive, sexually so even, about his favourite poet. The repeated suggestion regarding his past loves is that he has used and discarded them and that at no point has consent been anywhere in his thoughts. His relation to his colleagues is inimical – he seeks to crush or manipulate them, as he ultimately seeks to do to Shade himself by forcing him to write a poem about his (probably invented) past as a king. For Kinbote, simply, people don’t really exist.

Shade comes across as someone who is the opposite. His love for his wife and daughter are fundamentally unself-centred. His relationship with Kinbote, what we can read of it anyway, seems to be further evidence of a kindness and tolerance that Kinbote lacks. At one point Kinbote lets himself in to the Shades’ abode through a door left ajar, causing Shade to utter “an unprintable oath”. Shade had (apparently) mistakenly thought Kinbote was a travelling salesman. But still the Shades invite him to sit down and have a cup of tea. The walks the two men take, likewise, seem more like the poet is humouring the annoying (and lonely) foreigner Kinbote, than truly forming the deep friendship with him which Kinbote claims for himself.

In other words, the book is contrast of isolation versus connecting – the binding couplets placed against the commentary which is largely disconnected from the commented. This is perhaps the work’s most moral message, one that brings together all of its elements – the different forms, the trickery and disguises, the reflection. One life succeeds, another fails – it’s simply the case that the wrong man died. Nabokov liked his irony, of course. I have also failed to give any indication of how funny this book is. There’s not just the fun of puzzling it all out, but actual belly-laugh humour here. I think that’s why Pale Fire is so impressive. While I did find the Zembla story tedious at times, the novel as a whole is peerlessly readable. It’s funny, it’s allusive, it’s thoughtful, it’s moral. It’s basically impossible to read without finding at least one moment you can celebrate.

In short, it’s one of those books that is truly inspirational. It is quite simply a reminder of the heights that truly the best literary works can reach.  

Giovanni’s Room – James Baldwin

Truth and self-deception are topics that are never far from literature’s pages. The omission in speech of the facts of the heart, or else the failure to acknowledge them even within one’s own soul, is often the chute down which tragedy falls our lives. Yet in a way, I find books about authenticity harder and harder to believe the closer their settings get to our own time. In life, by which I mean within that vague lumpy western collective population I have to refer to here, it has become boringly easy to tell the truth. Marriages, that great source of anguished self-deception, are no longer arranged, nor are the consequences of divorce as total and obliterating as they were in the days of Anna Karenina or Effi Briest. At an art book fair in Düsseldorf at the weekend, I was surrounded by people who seemed to be being their authentic selves – making bizarre but personal images, wearing silly clothes, having the kind of hairstyles my girlfriend considers hot and my mother considers ghastly.

I wondered, perhaps, whether many of us really now really know inauthenticity well enough to articulate it. If I were to speak of my own case, born into reasonably great financial and social privilege but failing either to commit to being a writer to the full extent of my powers and energies or to commit to making a lot of money and influence as a lawyer or what-have-you by instead choosing a muddly middle ground in a relaxing, reasonably well paying corporate career where I have an excellent work-life balance and time each day to write a few pages – if I talked about this, about being dishonest to both my calling and my familial obligations, well then I would rightly make myself the subject of ridicule and only with great luck would I make a half-decent novel.

The overwhelming advantage and interest to me of writers whose identity conflicted with the society of their time is that they felt questions of authenticity with the full force they ought perhaps to have for us all. There’s Walt Whitman, at times my favourite poet – this man of joy thinly papering over his despair at having to transfer much of his love for men into love for man; then there is E.M. Forster, that supreme writer of the “muddle” of our hearts; and to that list I today add James Baldwin, long ago recommended to me, a gay Black American writer who spoke forcefully for rights and acceptance for himself and for others. I have begun my acquaintance with him through Giovanni’s Room, a novel of self-deception and tragedy in a Paris of the 1950s that is free enough for its main character to find love, but not free enough for him to be willing to admit it.

We start at the end, with the American David standing alone in the house in southern France that he and his girlfriend (fiancée) had rented together. He tells us that she is already on a ship back to the United States. As for Giovanni, this other person with a claim upon David’s heart, this is his last morning alive. The guillotine awaits him. While Giovanni’s Room holds some information back, such as the nature of Giovanni’s crime, the broad contours of its plot – that a man loves a man and yet cannot commit to him, destroying their relationship – are no mystery, even to a reader that has ducked past the book’s back cover. Such an approach, and the way that the narrative is told by David as he looks back upon the wreck of his life, lends the text a fatalistic, determined atmosphere.

This is assuredly deliberate. Looking at Giovanni’s Room as a whole, a certain link becomes apparent between its images and ideas – or rather, a particular opposition. One of movement versus standing still. I have to avoid the temptation to write “stasis”, because Baldwin’s lack of movement is more nuanced than that word would imply. The same thing keeps me from writing “flight”, though this is how David – an American who has left his homeland – describes his own life. Instead, using this simple binary, Baldwin’s other images and ideas, whether the sea, or acting, or time itself, are reflected and refracted, over and over.

But first I should mention the plot. How Hella, David’s girlfriend, had gone away to Spain to think about whether to marry him, while he stayed on in Paris. How Jacques, a wealthy businessman, and David had gone drinking to a bar owned by the Frenchman Guillaume, and how there the bartender was a handsome Italian, Giovanni. How with the same inevitability of the text, Giovanni and David begin a passionate affair that cannot last. (They acknowledge this inevitability too, in word if not in fact). How in the end, Hella returns, and sees Giovanni, and eventually discovers the nature of his relationship with David.

Within this cast we already have one of the markers of a lack of movement – reflections. At several points in the story David is confronted with his reflection as he cleans the house in preparation for his departure in the morning, and from that reflection he quite literally flees. Movement makes the water ripple, the image unrecognisable. Guillaume and Jacques, older gay men, are a kind of grotesque mirror of Giovanni and David. They chase after young men, but their lives are empty of love. Guillaume, the last member of an ancient family, has through his failure to sire an heir become a kind of image of David’s own anxieties over his need to create a family. Jacques can hardly admit his sexuality, even as he tries to flirt with David. The comparison between these young and older men becomes starker once David has broken off with Giovanni, for the latter ends up falling in with Jacques, and thereby begins to adopt “a fairy’s mannerisms”, the same as him. Still another reflection is between Hella and Giovanni – both offering certain images of the future. One respectable, the other true. David sees himself, and the reader sees other reflections, but what we notice each time is his refusal to face those reflections. Self-deception only works if you don’t stand still long enough for the self to notice.

Self-deception births flight – “by not looking at the universe, by not looking at myself, by remaining, in effect, in constant motion.” Two images best characterise David’s vision of the alternative, of staying still – a cave and a room. After David’s first sexual experience with a man, he runs from the house in horror: “That body suddenly seemed the black opening of a cavern in which I would be tortured till madness came, in which I would lose my manhood.” “Seemed” – while this word is necessary for a simile, it also contains uncertainty – David doesn’t know how things will be. In the same way, even “opening” hints at something positive: potentiality rather than any negative. Even leaving aside the “manhood” topic for now, the striking thing about this image is not just its power as an image – because it comes in the text suddenly and bearing horror – but also that this image undermines itself. David does not just tell the readers how he thinks he feels, he also, crucially and accidentally, reveals his doubts about those very feelings.

Then there is the room. Giovanni lives outside of the Paris centre, alone, in a small room. Like the cave, the room’s symbolic meanings are multiple. As the doors close for Giovanni and David’s first night together, it is clearly a place of lust and freedom – its very darkness becomes a source of intimacy and desire. It takes one out of the world, distorting time – David feels the need to remind the reader throughout the story that “I did not really stay there very long”. His text, naturally, tells another tale – Hella, the woman he attempts to persuade himself he loves, is barely on the page until the end. Is time to be measured by the days we are truly alive, or just those where all our organs are functioning? David might think it is the latter, but his narration tells us the former.

When David decides to view the room negatively, it becomes so – dirty, overcrowded with rubbish, with peeling wallpaper, and so on. He tries to make himself view it as a site of constraint, rather than of freedom. Unfortunately for him, Giovanni’s later attempts to renovate the place and make it more homely by adding a bookcase mean that even this critical view fails to convince the reader. David calls it “some weird idea”, but at this point the bookcase becomes a reminder Giovanni’s commitment to the relationship that is contrasted harshly with David’s own lack of investment, his constant backward movement.

Few people, however, come out of Giovanni’s Room well or even looking well. Within its pages, it’s a profoundly pessimistic book. The wreck of David’s life at its end is monumental. What hurts, as a reader, is the extent of his self-knowledge. He knows perfectly well how he deludes himself, but that cannot change the past or offer much hope for the future. The affirmations we get, “With everything in me screaming No! yet the sum of me sighed Yes”, are always tempered by the commitment failures that follow.

David surrenders each time only to retreat later. His assertions of a desire for normality are brilliantly false, paper-thin. “I wanted children. I wanted to be inside again, with the light and safety, with my manhood unquestioned, watching my woman put my children to bed.” Really what David wants is a state of innocence that he knows is impossible – a state of things, rather than the concreteness of the children or wife. “Watching”, “unquestioned” – he wants to be able to view his life without shame. But whoever wanted children or a wife rightly or truly only because of the image they would confer? There is also the implicit egotism of that longing – “my” is repeated three times in a single sentence. (Perhaps this also reflects a fear of Giovanni’s equality to him, a desire for control he cannot have with the man). In short, David’s failure to commit is as painful as Giovanni’s own tragedy. That second man, at least, cannot be faulted for his emotions or his earnestness.

Among the characters it is Hella, David’s fiancée, who has the most interesting trajectory, because it contrasts with all the others so clearly. She ends the novel, we learn at its beginning, on a ship back towards her own country. Like David, like all of the other characters, she is acting throughout, putting on a performance for the people around her. In her case, she has pretended to the bohemianism and libertarianism of Paris. Yet upon returning from Spain, she discovers that in reality “I’m not really the emancipated girl I try to be at all. I guess I just want a man to come home to me every night. I want to be able to sleep with a man without being afraid he’s going to knock me up. Hell, I want to be knocked up.” The characters that Giovanni’s Room destroys – David, Giovanni, Guillaume and Jacques – are all given desires that the world they live in will not tolerate seeing in the open. Only the woman, whose true wish (perhaps) is obliterating conventionality, is given the chance not only to know herself, but to be able to choose that life. None of the others, faced with an oppressive society and personal weakness, get anywhere close to this.

In all this and in the cyclicity of the story – with a narrator looking back upon a failed life and an ending returning us to the winter season that marked its beginning – Giovanni’s Room is profoundly pessimistic in temperament. There is no happy ending, of the sort that (admittedly) hurt Forster’s Maurice in my eyes. Instead, the forces to conform are triumphant. Yet by bringing us to face this desolation, the book instead serves that noble goal – that of illuminating all the more brightly the horror of the inauthentically lived life, and the terrible pressures to conform placed upon anyone whose desires or identity lie beyond the “normal” world. Giovanni’s Room is a wonderfully moral book, a profoundly serious one, and that is quite enough.

Elif Batuman – The Idiot

I bought Elif Batuman’s The Idiot because I wanted to read a contemporary reimagining of Dostoevsky’s Idiot, which I suppose makes me the idiot on this particular occasion, since the connection to Dostoevsky is tenuous. Instead, it’s a novel about a naïve student on her first year at Harvard who falls in love and spends the summer in Hungary. It’s a novel with ideas, if not quite a novel of ideas. Selin, the protagonist, studies things like linguistics and the philosophy of language, and reads books like The Magic Mountain, and has an opinion on Dostoevsky. However, on the level of language this is more akin to Sally Rooney than Mann or the Russian. It’s all light and easy sentences, dialogue smooth as someone letting a slinky slide between two outstretched arms, and disorganised observations of things in rooms. It’s real in the way reality TV is real – it is existence absent of any redeeming light.

One of the criticisms I might make of it is that so much of its four hundred, easy-to-read pages, feels meaningless. The things caught in our narrator’s gaze often have neither narrative nor thematic relevance; their purpose is to make reality feel real, but often they don’t even seem to do that. The interactions between characters are regularly similarly lightweight. Yet the novel as a whole might make for itself the defence that it is actually serious about meaning, that such scenes are essential to its construction, that I am the one misunderstanding it. For indeed, being a work about language, love, and communication, it tries to treat seriously the shifting presence and absence of meaning in our day-to-day lives. Perhaps. The fact that I sit here writing this suggests maybe it’s a case worth making.

The Idiot begins in 1995 with Turkish-American Selin arriving at Harvard to begin her undergraduate studies. She meets her roommates and her classmates. She majors in linguistics and studies things in the philosophy and psychology of language. She volunteers a little of her time to teach maths and English as a second language, largely without success. She goes to the odd party but barely drinks and certainly does nothing sexual. There are many characters who drift in and out, largely undifferentiated, but there are two that are important – Ivan, an older Hungarian man Selin meets during Russian class, and Svetlana, a Serbian girl from the same class. Ivan provides a kind of love interest for Selin, while Svetlana is a kind of worldly motherly figure for her. In the summer break Selin goes to Paris with Svetlana, and from there on to Hungary, where she is to teach English to some Hungarian village children.

It makes sense to start with language, since these are the ideas that underpin the novel as a whole. With her linguistics studies, Selin tries to make sense of language itself by considering how language could be explained to Martians, or by them to us. “Supposing we went to Mars and the Martians said “gavagai” every time a rabbit ran by”, it would not be possible to know whether this referred to running, or rabbits, or something else entirely. Selin finds this depressing, as this early introduction to communication seems to suggest we cannot communicate, that meaning is trapped inside of us, never to get out. Naturally, this is an introductory class, so the fact that Selin can’t get anywhere towards solving this problem is one of those examples where a text seems to provide a problem that contains the seeds of its own later dissolution. (She should keep studying as it’s obvious she does not have the full picture yet).

The novel also challenges this “communication doesn’t work” idea through a short story for Russian learners whose chapters are scattered throughout its pages. This tells of a girl called Nina who goes to Siberia after the man she loves disappears, but one of its quirks is that the text is simplified to focus on the grammatical structures the learners are currently focusing on, such as a particular grammatical case. While the story contains plenty of miscommunications, the fact that a coherent narrative can be produced even with such obvious linguistic limitations rather suggests that it is people who are failing to communicate, rather than language itself. In other words, meaning’s general transferability is not precluded by language. Rather, it is people who are the problem. I found this a little unsatisfying – The Idiot introduces a problem only to deny it is one.

This sense that people are the problem is one we might have picked up on from the novel’s title, of course. Selin is naïve – in this she has something in common with Prince Myshkin. Since she is naïve and innocent she struggles with the articulation of her own emotions towards Ivan, turning from speech to lengthy emails that might work if they were not themselves, inevitably, an exercise in avoiding communication – they talk indirectly, and so do not reach the destination:

“Dear Selin, would you trade wine and cheese for vodka and pickles? Why does a Greek hero have to fight his fate? Are dice a lethal weapon?  Is there any way to escape the triviality-dungeon of conversations? Why did you stop coming to math?”

The above is one of Ivan’s, though Selin’s are no better. At times they also use Russian, a language neither of them knows well, which naturally enough does not help either. These are two people failing language. This is a point stressed when Selin is in rural Hungary teaching English, and trying and failing to fight a local fellow-teacher who insists one pronouncing all the silent vowels in English. “One”, becoming “oh-neh”, for example. Selin herself does not really seem to realise that teaching requires effort on her part, so while she is critical of her co-teacher she gets nowhere with her own students – “Papel iss blonk”, one of them says, for “the paper is white”. Failure, but human failure, everywhere.

These failures mean that Ivan and Selin do not connect in the way they should, or could, and create joint meanings together. They leave things unsaid, or said in a distorted manner. In this they are like teenagers, however, rather than people seriously struggling with a higher-order problem about the possibility of meaning transference. We might say that Batuman wants to make a point about culture here, and its relationship to this connection-building among people. Hungary and America (or Turkey) are different! Look, Ivan hasn’t read Walden. Again, the text raises this potential problem only to refute itself. The Hungarians and Turks can bond, we are told, over the shared indignities of the collapse of empire – “Trianon! Touché!” one of the Hungarians says. Even the legendarily strange Hungarian language is demystified by Batuman stressing the similarities and loanwords common to it and Turkish.

It is perhaps wrong to disparage a book called The Idiot for having an idiot at its centre or suggesting that the ideas she encounters are really less important than her own failures. (Would this not mean that writing a novel called “A bad book” would always be good, unless it were excellent?) Yet it’s wrong to dismiss how corrosive the idea of human failure can be when it becomes central. A lot of Russian novels – and Batuman loves Russian novels enough to have written a whole book on them – centre on the gap between the idea and the reality of human practices. Raskolnikov’s theory of murder, and the reality of a bloodied axe, for example. But there’s an important distinction to be made between this and what The Idiot does. Raskolnikov or Bazarov discover that human failings cause issues for their philosophies. Selin has no philosophy to be challenged, so ideas cannot be central to the work, no matter what other reviewers on the cover might say.

Perhaps we can rephrase this in terms of the ideas and their potential for realisation. Communication is possible. Sometimes it’s hard, but that’s allowed. The theories on it are developed and probably, to a certain extent, the result of real thought and experimentation. Utopias, as far as we can make out, are not possible. The ideas fail because they imagine an incorrect view of human nature. Communication eludes Selin not because the theories are wrong, but because she is naïve, childish, and doesn’t really put any effort in. One approach becomes universal because it’s about all of our failings, while the other is about an individual’s failings which she will probably sort out once she has grown up a little.  

I have gone quite far from what I actually thought is the most interesting thing in this book – its use of section breaks. While Ivan and Selin’s not-relationship is the central story of the book, the bulk of it is taken up with Selin’s day-to-day experiences of being a new student in a big university. When I was about sixteen and thought I could teach myself writing through an entirely formulaic approach, I read in various places that my sections could never be shorter than 1’500 words and should always include some kind of conflict. This number has stuck with me even as it has never helped me much with my own writing. With The Idiot, Batuman doesn’t follow this rule either. Many of its sections are impressionistic and under a page in length. They accumulate, creating a sense of Selin’s experience of Harvard. They are snatches of conversations, or things spotted from a window. They are not, really, meaningful – even within a mesh of novelistic themes and meanings. But they are the brocade out of which the novel as a whole is built.

What is mildly interesting here is the way that Batuman builds meaning into this use of length and brevity. On the one hand, this is most obvious in the way that once the not-romance gets going, the sections with Ivan are considerably longer than the sections without him. It’s a quite direct way of putting the disorganised meaninglessness of the earlier sections into perspective by showing the paucity of their development quite literally on the page. On the other, and more thematically curious, is the way that this relates to Selin’s friendship with Svetlana. There is a moment when Svetlana reveals that she used to be bulimic and the narrative cannot contend with this fact, so the section just ends. It’s not presented as something deeply revealing from Svetlana within context, but Selin’s lack of reaction is another indication about the meaning-problem of the novel. Selin is yet again too immature, too naïve, to appreciate what her friend has told her. It’s not relevant to her own story.

If there’s something close to an epiphany to cap The Idiot, it’s the discovery by Selin that she is not the centre of the world, only of her world. This little bulimia mention is one example, as are the countless new people that she meets in Hungary: “I also felt that these superabundant personages weren’t irrelevant at all, but somehow the opposite, and that when Ivan had told me to make friends with the other kids, he had been telling me something important about the world, about how the fateful character in your life wasn’t the one who buried you in a rock, but the one who led you out to more people.”

I can be charitable and say that the novel begins with a meaningless mass of impressions, grows more formally clear at its centre with Ivan, then ends up with a return to those same disconnected impressions. Only this time, Selin has a new consciousness of what they mean through her slightly-increased maturity. She has a sense that even if they are disconnected and non-narrativised to herself, they may be formed and clear in others’ worlds. Indeed, perhaps that’s one hidden message of all the teaching in the novel – that a teacher, like Selin herself, can have an impact on her students far greater than she herself would ever know.

Anyway, it was a reasonably funny, easy-to-read, work of contemporary fiction. Now I can go back to the dead.