December 1, 2021

In this sequel to Batuman's Pulitzer Prize finalist The Idiot, Selin, the daughter of Turkish immigrants, is now a Harvard sophomore trying to sort out her loop-de-loop summer in Hungary and her feelings for the slippery Hungarian mathematics student Ivan even as Ivan's former girlfriend wants to chat. It's as if Selin were in the midst of a thrilling novel but one unfortunately starring an off-kilter woman who's been dumped. Can she fix that with the help of her literary syllabus and her friends?

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Starred review from March 7, 2022
In this effervescent sequel to The Idiot, Batuman continues charting the sentimental education of Selin, a student of Russian literature at Harvard. As Selin begins her sophomore year in 1996, she’s still nursing an unrequited crush on Ivan, a Hungarian graduate student. Meanwhile, her friends Svetlana and Riley begin dating boys on campus, causing Selin to lament their perceived loss of independence (after Svetlana hooks up with the guy she’ll end up with, Selin predicts, “She would never again be what she had been, not in my life, and not in her own”). Observant, defiant, and newly on antidepressants, Selin approaches the mystery of human relations with a beginner’s naivete and sharp intelligence. At parties, in dorm rooms, and through reading French, Russian, and German literature and philosophy, she reflects on the tragic asymmetry of connections between men and women, and wonders how, exactly, “a person could live an aesthetic life.” Meanwhile, she recounts her frustrations with Proust and reverence for Fiona Apple and Lauryn Hill, and embarks on a messy series of email threads with Ivan and his ex-girlfriend. Batuman’s light touch and humor are brought to bear on serious questions, enabling the novel to move quickly between set pieces like an S&M-themed student party, poignant recollections of Selin’s parents’ divorce, and a harrowing travelogue as Selin begins a summer job in Turkey. As accomplished as The Idiot was, this improves upon it, and Batuman’s already sharp chops as a novelist come across as even more refined in these pages. Readers will be enraptured. Agent: Sarah Chalfant, Wylie Agency.

Starred review from March 15, 2022
The heroine of The Idiot (2017), Batuman's Pulitzer Prize finalist, continues to interrogate the intersection of art and identity during her sophomore year at Harvard. It's 1996, and Selin is embarking on her fall semester with a broken heart and a lingering obsession with Ivan, the mathematician she'd fallen in love with as a first-year student. When she's not checking her email, hoping for a message from him, she's reading Kierkegaard and Andr� Breton, looking for clues about the kind of person she wants to be. Walking to the library on a Saturday night, she encounters small groups of students, "the girls laughing hysterically and collapsing against the guys' chests. I knew that was what a person was supposed to be doing, but I didn't know why, or how." All Selin knows for sure is that she will be a novelist, but she's still trying to figure out how to do that, too, and she sees the problem of how to live and the question of how to write as two sides of the same dilemma. She spends a lot of time thinking about sex--something she wants to have done but doesn't actually want to do--and it says a lot about her that she regards her fear of sex as "immature and anti-novelistic." But making the deliberate choice to shed her virginity isn't quite the turning point she imagined. It's when she travels to Russia for an internship that she feels a new sense of self-possession and possibility. This is not a plot-driven novel, so readers who like a lot of action may not enjoy Selin's philosophizing or penchant for deep analysis. But Selin is a disarming narrator, tossing off insights that are revelatory, moving, and laugh-out-loud funny--sometimes all at once--and it's exciting to watch her become the author of her own story. Another delightfully cerebral and bighearted novel from a distinctive voice in contemporary fiction.

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Starred review from March 15, 2022
Selin, the magnetic protagonist in Batuman's brilliant and comedic first novel, The Idiot (2017), returns to Harvard for her sophomore year in 1996, still bewildered by her elusive crush, Ivan. The American-born daughter of two now-divorced Turkish doctors, Selin is enthralled by Russian literature, studying Russian, and intent on becoming a writer. She picks up Kierkegaard's Either/Or as part of her quest to comprehend the differences between the ethical and the aesthetic life, debating the fine points with her confident friend Svetlana. Stymied by her relentless moral inquisitiveness--Why should one have children? Is it reprehensible for writers to turn real people into fictional characters?--Selin follows her cancer-survivor mother's advice and starts taking antidepressants, which make her feel less daunted, precipitating alarming and funny new quandaries that, in hall-of-mirrors fashion, reveal evermore conundrums. Month by month, Batuman's brainy, attentive, outspoken narrator grapples with the absurd (literary pretension, academics, sex) and the sublime (literature, music, sex). As summer looms, Selin secures a gig writing about Turkey for the Let's Go travel series, which, thanks to her aunt, catalyzes protective interference by Turkish intelligence agents which does not prevent disconcerting, frightening, sexy, and hilarious encounters with men on the make. Through it all, valiant Selin reads and ponders the human condition, culminating in a breath-catching ending that will leave spellbound readers hoping for more from Batuman's bright and witty adventurer of conscience.

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