Elif Batuman
- Interview by Emily Stokes
- Free Radical●June 2017
The epigraph to Elif Batuman’s latest novel, The Idiot, is taken from Marcel Proust’s Within a Budding Grove and describes the paradox of youth: “There is hardly a single action we perform in that phase which we would not give anything, in later life, to be able to annul,” he writes. “Whereas what we ought to regret is that we no longer possess the spontaneity which made us perform them.” The Idiot is a celebration of what Proust calls this “ridiculous age.” The novel follows Selin, the child of Turkish immigrants, as she settles into Harvard in the mid-1990s. Batuman, born in 1977 to Turkish parents and grew up in New Jersey, wrote the novel at twenty-three, immediately after her own undergraduate years at Harvard, in a break from a Ph.D. at Stanford in comparative literature. As she told me recently, it wasn’t until after she had published The Possessed, a collection of essays about studying the Russian authors she loved, and had become a staff writer at The New Yorker, that she returned to the manuscript, at the age of thirty-eight. She was at the time struggling to write a novel about a female journalist in her thirties; instead, she kept writing long flashbacks to her student days. The reworked novel, like almost everything that Batuman writes, is both erudite and personal, carefully sculpted and cringingly honest.
What’s interesting about email as a literary genre? Is email a part of your process?
In the mid-90s, email was this space of tremendous freedom. At first it wasn't totally clear what it was for, which meant that you could do anything with it, and as with all new forms there was a pressure to do something new, to invent a new content for the form. Many passages in my first book, The Possessed, started out as emails I wrote to my classmates about funny things that had happened that day. At that time I was using emails instead of a diary. Today, I don’t keep a diary or write anyone delightful detailed emails. My inbox is all just work and requests and the soulless exchange system of courtesies. I just got back from a vacation where I didn't look at email for four days. I went to Puerto Rico and it rained every single day but I didn't care, it was so incredible not to be on email. A friend of mine was just saying, If a movie with a title called You’ve Got Mail came out now, it would be a horror movie. It’s all become routinized and bureaucratized, and a lot of the delight-function has been outsourced to social media.
I notice you recently joined Instagram.
Yeah, exactly—in the old days, if you saw something crazy or beautiful or hilarious, you had to describe it in an email. It took forever and it was a huge pain in the butt, and it was just for one person. I mean, you could copy-paste your description and send it to all your friends, but you’d feel like a jerk. Now you see something funny, take a picture of it in one second and put it on Instagram, and all your friends can see it at once. It’s much more efficient, but less personal, and you don’t end up with those nice, beautiful documents.
Both your fiction and your nonfiction essays remind us of those nice, beautiful documents—full of details that feel really intimate. Is there something freeing about writing about things that you know to be true?
I wonder sometimes how much control people have over what they write about—whether it’s fiction or nonfiction. I feel like a lot of writers write what they can write, or what they have to write about, and for me that’s often things that actually happened. I know some novelists feel freed by inventing things, and constrained by writing about the arbitrary ways that things happen to have cashed out. I feel the opposite. Writing stories about completely invented, imaginary people doing imaginary things—to me that feels like censorship, because what I want to write about is often the actual way things are, the way things really are in the world. Really the most interesting problems to me are the problems I’ve experienced. To change the details too much feels distracting. Like—my life is already enough of a mystery to me, I don’t need to make it more mysterious by adding more unknown variables. When I talk to a fact-checker—I know for some people, the most salient feature of fact-checking is hearing about all the things that don’t check out. But for me, the thing that’s always the most astounding is the majority of stuff that does check out. Part of me just can’t believe that my experiences and interactions in the world are verifiable, that I didn’t in some way dream them or make them up.
If I’m writing fiction and I invent something that’s too far from the truth, I feel like people will be able to tell, the way that the IRS can tell if you fictionalized your taxes. The numbers you invent—they have these telltale signs.
In the introduction to The Possessed, you describe the plot of The Idiot. You Write, “There may be interesting and moving experiences, but one thing is guaranteed: they won’t naturally assume the shape of a wonderful book.”
What were some of the changes you made to the original manuscript?
I cut a lot of the editorializing and flashbacks. There were all these retrospective musings ("When we are young we are so very foolish, then we get older and realize..."), written from the perspective of a twenty-three-year-old. When I wrote the first draft, I was at some pains to show that I, the writer, wasn't as stupid as the Elif-like person I was writing about. Revisiting that manuscript at age thirty-eight, I realized that the "stupid" parts were the most moving and real to me. So I tried to bring them out more, and to let them stand alone, and that’s also when I decided to call the book The Idiot.
Are there things you have learned as a teacher that inform your writing?
A lot of the work of teaching is imaginative. You have to remember what it is not to know. And it’s important to approach students with the same basic level of respect for the other that you bring to other human interactions. You can’t assume that you know everything about them, or that their whole experience is so much easier than your experience, which is something that I felt from teachers sometimes. I think Selin feels that with some of her professors in The Idiot.
Were you influenced by any campus novels?
You know, when I wrote the first draft, I didn’t realize I was writing a campus novel. My whole adult life at that point had taken place on campuses, so I was just writing about life. When I revisited the manuscript at age thirty-eight, the “campus novel” aspect seemed really obvious, so I decided to make the timeline of the novel coincide with the calendar year of Selin’s first year of college.
How did you come to read the Stoics?
I was having a difficult time for various reasons and I happened to read Sarah Bakewell’s wonderful biography of Montaigne, How To Live. I was not super-compelled by all of Montaigne—to me, all the slam dunks were when he talked about the Stoics. So I decided to look into them. I was in Turkey at the time, so I was doing most of my reading by Kindle, and I downloaded a book by a philosophy professor, William Irvine, who had been in some completely different field of philosophy and then had discovered the Stoics. He read the Stoics as a philosopher and was like, “Oh, this is what we all thought philosophy was when we were kids. It’s about how the meaning of life, and practical advice.” I first tried out the exercises with little things, like when I forgot my keys, just thinking, “Nothing bad has happened.” It really helped. Out of the different Stoics, I read some Marcus Aurelius and Seneca and Epictetus, and Epictetus’s teacher Musonius Rufus.
Some of the happiest moments in your novel are those in which Selin has escaped the action, by reading.
There’s kind of a received idea that books with literary criticism in them should be nonfiction—they should be memoirs or essays. But I don’t see why novels can’t have reading in them. Iris Murdoch has characters reading Thucydides. Don Quixote goes into a lot of detail about which books Don Quixote read. Proust, too. When I was revising The Idiot, I realized it isn’t always clear what Selin wants, or what she thinks is going to make her happy—and really the happiest scenes in the book are when she’s eating hazelnut wafers and reading Dracula, or eating chocolate and reading The Magic Mountain. I guess I’m very fond of eating sweets and reading.
Emily Stokes is features editor at newyorker.com.
Further reading
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Brazenhead Books
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Lynne Tillman
Lynne Tillman grew up in Woodmere, New York, and attended Hunter College. Her first novel, Haunted Houses, was published in 1987—a narrative about three girls who, for all their proximity on the page, never meet each other, their adjacent chapters like ships in the night. Conceptually bold, Tillman’s writing is often described as “experimental,” but it is never cold or sterile.