Dear Readers:
Each month, you will receive an email from me about the boredom & the horror & the glory, except I took last month off. But now I’m back, with the 37th one.
The older I get, the more confused I am that all songs are about love affairs. Is this such a big deal, that it’s nearly the only thing that moves people to sing? What about everything else? These little incidents of passion, confusion, heartbreak, connection, attraction, sex, flattery, disappointment, excitement, what we call romantic love, these are not what life is about. They’re not the hard, complicated, interesting things. I have to think that these songs, these 99.9% of songs, are about love only on their surface. What they’re really about is being young. An emblem of a collective nostalgia for being so young that you organize your life around emotion.
“Why was there no department of love?” Selin, the 1990s-era Harvard sophomore protagonist of Elif Batuman’s new book Either/or wonders to her friend Svetlana as they hungrily look through the course catalog to choose their classes. Batuman has Selin say a lot of things like that, and you can tell she’s proud of Selin, as she should be, for being so stupid and smart and young to say such things.
I loved Batuman’s previous novel, The Idiot, about Selin’s freshman year, so when I saw a sequel was coming out, I pounced on the library waiting list. It arrived on my kindle the day it was published. Either/or is as sparkling and funny and charming as The Idiot, but I didn’t enjoy it nearly as much.
In The Idiot, Selin is an awesome idiot, bookish and passionate and searching. The novel is loosely plotted around her yearlong, semi-romantic friendship with Ivan. There is no point to this friendship; it’s not leading anywhere, they’re not going to get married or anything, they’re not even going to have sex. In The Idiot, sex is a department at another school in another country. In Either/or the obsession with Ivan recedes, and Selin begins her sex life. Where The Idiot was as pointless as a long afternoon/evening/night/middle-of-the-night being young, standing around on the porches of peoples’ off-campus apartments under the influence, Either/or is pointed. Batuman explains the point to John Dickerson in a podcast:
I started writing Either/or in 2017, which was a few months before #metoo, and then, after that, there was the Kavanaugh hearing, and it was a time when we were thinking about Monica Lewinsky and Anita Hill and all these things that had actually happened in the ’90s, and it was a time when as a culture we were retelling these stories using terminology we didn’t have then and vocabulary and concepts we didn’t have then. And I think a lot of women my age, especially after Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony, were narrating their earlier lives to themselves in a different way, and that was a project that I was doing too. And Either/or is very much a project of revisiting that time through the lens of what I know now but trying to go back into a time before I knew those things, and to reconstruct what I did know and what I didn’t know.
That is a great project, but I don’t want Selin to be involved in it. Because when she starts to have sex, she’s not Selin anymore.
In the early pages of Either/or, Selin says, delightfully, “What I knew about ‘having sex’ didn’t correspond to anything I wanted or had felt.” Sex is so distant that it’s not even embarrassing to say this, it’s just the way it is. When Svetlana gets a boyfriend, Matt, and has sex, Selin loses Svetlana to that distant plane, and we, the readers, lose Svetlana, too–she just disappears from the novel altogether. Selin tells us with a specificity that recalls for me, on a deep emotional level, the feeling of losing a friend to sex and romantic love. “When I stopped by her room to pick her up to go jogging, Svetlana opened the door wearing just leggings and a sports bra,” a chapter begins. Svetlana’s state of undress is a harbinger of a big change: “I hooked up with Matt,” she explains. After that, Selin tells us, “Nothing went back to normal.” Selin is overcome with “envy, jealousy, loneliness, despair–and also a kind of guilt, mixed with relief. …[Svetlana] would never again be what she had been, not in my life, and not in her own. This boyfriend, or his successor, would restrict her activities, her thoughts.” To type out these quotations brings tears to my eyes. I remember those years, which lasted forever, where everyone was standing on a craggy cliff above a cold sea, and then people started to jump, and I just stood there. I wanted to keep standing on the cliff, or to turn back the way we came.
OK, so to revise what I said earlier: it’s not just nostalgia for youth that love songs are really about. They’re also about nostalgia for the time before that. A time of almost unbearably vivid, now unimaginable-to-me, depth of feeling that’s completely undirected; it’s about everything. Then, when you get a little older, you direct it at romance and sex. And then you grow up entirely and that depth of feeling isn’t a part of your world anymore.
Or maybe that’s just my experience. But I think it’s a lot of people’s.
So finally Selin jumps off the cliff, too. There are some hilarious and searingly real observations along the way (“insofar as he didn’t seem to think I was special, and seemed to be engaging with me only as a girl, a woman, as a member of the category he pursued because of what he was–it felt euphoric and freeing, it was one of the most exciting things that had ever happened to me”). But eventually, Selin, too, goes the way of Svetlana. I see her become an embodiment of an issue, that gray zone between consent and non-consent that, revisited (to use Batuman’s word), is nonconsent.
Writing for Let’s Go in Turkey for the summer, Selin encounters a young man who follows her to Anemurium, an ancient beach city she is tasked with writing about.
“When we got there, he wanted to have sex. Why did this keep happening? It was weird that there were only two options: yes and no. Which was active, which was passive? What would I want to happen in a book? What was it that it said in that one particular book? ‘Only connect?’”
My Selin, from The Idiot and the first part of Either/or, would never say the phrase “that one particular book.” It would never come from her fantastically detail-hounding, information-tracking brain. She holds on to everything she reads, everything anybody says, playful-angry like a dog with a toy, trying to make it disclose its meaning. She would remember that only connect is the epigraph to Howard’s End, and if she didn’t, she wouldn’t call it “that one particular book,” as if she doesn’t have thousands of books in her arsenal, each “particular,” not just one particular one. This sexual person she suddenly is sounds like someone who’s hardly read a book in her life. Does her interrogation of that gray zone in sex strip away all the other things she knows, the way she thinks? How could it?
Reading this, I feel like Selin opening the dorm-room door and seeing Svetlana in her leggings and sports bra: No! Come back! Selin, like Svetlana, will “never again be what she had been, not in my life, and not in her own.” Not in her own life! This is unbearable, but I believe it’s true. When that change happens to Selin herself, why don’t we find out what it feels like? Not telling us cuts against the point at the center of Batuman’s project: that when you’re in a sexual encounter, you’re still a me, you’re still a person, with rights and thoughts and feelings, even if you don’t think you are, even if you don’t have the “terminology” or “vocabulary” or “concepts” with which to assert them.
I think Either/or’s point is too heavy for the novel; it crushes Selin, and Svetlana, Ivan, and everyone else along with it. To change isn’t to go away entirely; to feel differently, or even less vividly, is not the same as not feeling at all. I mean, can’t Svetlana and Selin talk to each other again once they’re both having sex? And if they can’t, why not? Why don’t we ever seen or hear of Svetlana again? Is she banished because she had sex before Selin did? What does Selin think about Svetlana once she, too, is sexually active?
This is somehow related to something really annoying Sally Rooney does in her newest book, Beautiful World Where Are You. I’ll try to figure that out next month.
Sincerely,
Lucy