For example, this is how she describes a particular linguistics class: “we learned about people who had lost the ability to combine morphemes, after having their brains perforated by iron poles. She’s smart enough to know the ways in which she is dumb, and her off-kilter relationship to the world around her is revelatory and, often, mordantly hilarious. And, as it happens, Selin is delightful company. Selin is, among other things, a young woman trying to figure out the same things young people are always trying to figure out. This isn’t just bloodless philosophizing, though. Selin studies linguistics and literature, teaches ESL, and spends a lot of time thinking about what language-and languages-can and cannot do. Selin’s first romantic entanglement-which begins via electronic mail-is with Ivan, a Hungarian mathematician she meets in Russian class. Selin’s closest friends at Harvard are Ralph, a ridiculously handsome young man with a Kennedy fetish, and Svetlana, a Serbian from Connecticut. Her address contains her last name, “Karada?, but all lowercase, and without the Turkish ?, which was silent.” When presented with an Ethernet cable, she asks “What do we do with this, hang ourselves?” All of this occurs on the first page of Batuman’s ( The Possessed: Adventures With Russian Books and the People Who Read Them, 2011) debut novel, and it tells us just about everything we need to know about the author’s thematic concerns and style. One of the first things she learns upon arriving at her new school is that she has an email account. It’s fall 1995, and Selin is just starting her first year at Harvard.

A sweetly caustic first novel from a writer whose work has appeared in the New Yorker, the Paris Review, and n+1.

The idiot novel elif