Selin is a funny character — wry, sincere, indifferent, scathing, rash. She’s an open book, at least literally, as Elif Batuman’s recent release Either/Or (the second installation of Selin’s story) tracks the trials and tribulations of her sophomore year at Harvard after a tumultuous, subtly explosive almost-romance between her and older math student Ivan. This year, much like last year, everything happens and nothing happens: on the outside, Selin does the job of any good Harvard student, as pretentious theories, archaic, quirky books, and casual intellectual debates abound. On the inside, she obsesses and hyper-fixates, slipping down one rabbit hole or another on nearly every page, studying and contemplating the complexities of party politics, the frustrating indolence of her peers, why there isn’t a Department of Love in the college’s organization, and the absurd mantras and philosophies of her professors.
Beyond being a total achievement of semi-autobiographical characterization, Batuman’s Selin remains weirdly, bluntly endearing through the entirety of Either/Or. She thinks without boundaries, she’s plain about her affection and fierce, sometimes irrational loyalty to the people she loves. She has a knack for taking the mundane and spinning it into the profound. When Selin details her relationship with her mother, it is miserable and loving: “Sometimes, she said, she slept in my bed for one or two nights, because the bed still smelled like me. She smiled conspiratorially, and I felt my heart constrict.” When she reflects on living in the freshman dorms, it is mysterious and resonant: “How brief and magical it was that we all lived so close to each other and went in and out of each other’s rooms, and our most important job was to solve mysteries. The temporariness made it all the more important to do the right thing — to follow the right leads.”
All of this is to say: Selin is a focalized character, one whom we are encouraged to see the entire world through. It’s also functionally a bildungsroman, a story of Selin’s coming of age, which is interesting. The word “of,” connecting “coming” and “age,” has always implied a certain interiority — we do not come to age, we do not come upon age. At some point, we just are. Of age. This is why I think Batuman's novels are brilliant: she understands that the way to communicate the intensity of Selin’s human development in tenuous, consequential moments is through the richness of her winding, bursting inner life. Yes, it's first-person narration, but somehow, it feels like more. Everything we know as the audience is conveyed through her internal monologue, where thoughts and memories and collateral collide, sometimes catastrophically. And it is Selin's self-focus, her tender tolerance of spiraling private and puzzling thoughts, which hastens adulthood as she knows it. It is this that allows Selin to assert near the novel’s end a stunning, staggering statement of confidence, reassurance, and self-realization, possibly bound to end in chaos, as most hubristic manifestos do, but isn't this all of us: “I was going to remember, or discover, where everything came from. I was going to do the subtle, monstrous thing where you figured out what you were doing, and why."
I start my sophomore year at Berkeley in August (coincidentally, where Selin’s ex-non-boyfriend Ivan goes for his math doctorate, which makes total sense). I have much to learn and much to do. In many ways it seems like I'm not going anywhere. But I’ll remember Selin’s interior life even as the world spins and deteriorates and crackles around me as it always does in Berkeley. If I practice that attention, I’m bound to feel the same way that Selin does at the very end of Either/Or: “It was happening again now: some pieces of some larger story that I could barely make out were flying into new positions, and I was remembering things I had forgotten, and putting them together differently, and all while I was sitting still and not going anywhere.”
Cover Image: Detail from "Flirt" by Helen Frankenthaler
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