Either/Or

Either/Or by Elif Batuman
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Picking up from where we left Selin in The Idiot, we follow her through her Sophomore year and summer at Harvard. The emphasis changes from language to contradictions, which makes the writing more thoughtful and probing, and I enjoyed the musings Selin expounds about several books, films, and music. This introspection shows a maturing in Selin, even as she also expands some of her extracurricular activities, including drinking and having sex. For a kid that until that year hadn't even kissed anyone and fell deeply in love with someone solely over email, she sure moves fast, and I couldn't help wondering how someone so smart suddenly gets so stupid. (like lets not go home with some stranger in a foreign land where no one knows where you are!) But that plot-point notwithstanding, it is a novel full of deep thinking that I enjoyed.

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What was the role of chance in literature? The realist novel was predicated on the contingency of everyday life, laying out in its opening pages the accidents of the characters’ birth to a particular historical, geographic, and social milieu. Characters were no longer allegorical, or social types. They were doomed to have “personalities.”

The Repugnant Conclusion said that it was possible to justify decreasing a population’s quality of life, if you made the population bigger.

The physicist said that the girl was an ordinary star, and the boy was a black hole. You couldn’t see the boy, but the girl whirling around him was evidence that he existed, and was holding her in orbit. This seemed like corroboration of “The Seducer’s Diary,” where the seducer disappeared and Cordelia was going in circles. It seemed to me that the elements whirling around me in my own life were also somehow held in place by Ivan’s absence, or were there because of him—to counterbalance a void.

if everyone’s behavior was visibly consistent with what their attitude was supposed to be, then faith would be unnecessary.

And the great advantage of an arranged marriage was that your husband was committing, not to you personally, but to the institution of marriage—to his whole family, as well as to yours. That took a lot of pressure off your looks, which wouldn’t last forever, and off the rest of you, too, because whose personality was enchanting enough to keep a man interested for sixty years?

That was what Russia had done: taken a fork in the road to a different future.