I’ve just read Elif Batuman’s two novels, one after the other. They are very good I must say, or so I think. For all the mannered-ness and the somewhat terrifying literariness of the protagonist. I found it hard at first to tell if the first one was good because I started reading it without knowing what it was about – I got it because she’s a Turkish (or Turkish-American) author, and would probably write well since she’d written some good pieces in the New Yorker. I was taken aback as I realised whilst reading that the book was set at my university, just a few years before I started, and evoked with almost unbearable intensity what it was like being there, at that time, in that place. The feeling is the same, the people, the jokes, the attitudes, the technology, the air. She reacts and ruminates about so much that I encountered in the same way. Reading it was a strange, dizzying experience, to have one’s youth written about by someone else who seemed to almost share a mind – though I should say, a far more literary mind than mine.
This made it hard for me to tell if the books are any good. But having read them both – and the second is far less intense even though she lives in the same overflow housing I did as a sophomore and the rooms were fully familiar and so of that time – my most vivid memories of that dorm include watching Fight Club, of a US cousin coming to stay and telling me she was considering voting for George W Bush instead of Al Gore because she didn’t believe gays should be in the army (!!!! – what a different time that was), watching the election results come in, a friend from Texas using our kitchen to make the most disgusting concoction of tortilla chips and cheese from a spray can, and constant car alarms of that multi-tonal type one rarely hears now on the road below.
But to return to the book – the second is far less intense because the first was written a couple of years after she graduated, while the second was written in the last few years and college is not longer something to hold and turn over in one’s hands.
I found myself wishing she had been in my year as then she would have written about one of the most peculiar things at the time – of those special sessions held for incoming freshman where we all discussed our trauma from the Columbine massacre. I, who had read of the shootings in a newspaper and moved on swiftly, found the solemnity incomprehensible and hilarious. And now, looking back, thousands of dead bodies later I suppose the lack of comprehension at least was the right response, and perhaps, in its way, the hilarity too.
Yes, they are very good. They are funny, clever and thoughtful, and she is doing something interesting with them. I can imagine feeling irritated by them, but I did not tip over that line.