When she followed Ivan to Hungary at the end of her freshman year, though, their relationship ended without so much as a kiss. In The Idiot, she carried out a flirtation with an enigmatic Hungarian mathematician named Ivan almost entirely by email, all the while studying linguistics and thinking very hard about the relationship between language and meaning.
Selin is an undergraduate at Harvard in the 1990s, just as email is beginning to become A Thing. By the end of Either/Or, Selin has definitely learned something. The protagonist, Selin, took very few concrete actions, and at the end she informed us that she “hadn’t learned anything at all.” Either/Or, Batuman’s follow-up to The Idiot and a direct sequel, shares its predecessor’s dryly understated wit, but it does so with a far more conventional structure. The Idiot, Elif Batuman’s charmingly deadpan debut novel of 2018, was unconventional as coming of age stories go.
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