Selin’s developing feelings for Ivan coincide with her struggles to understand how language relates to reality. The narrator is heartbroken and even becomes physically ill, but eventually recovers. Ivan leaves for a conference in Japan, while Selin goes to Turkey. The two do meet up in Hungary, but their relationship does not progress any further despite attempts to articulate their feelings. Selin even agrees to teach English in a Hungarian village, in order to spend more time with Ivan over the summer. Selin’s interactions with Ivan are very intense, although their relationship never goes beyond the platonic. He is a senior from Hungary, who dreams about pursuing math at graduate school in California. The main part of the narrative focuses on Selin falling in love with Ivan, another student in her Russian class.
During her first weeks on campus, Selin befriends Svetlana, a neurotic international student from Serbia, and re-kindles her friendship with Ralph, a young man she met the previous summer at an academic program for high school students. She shares a dorm suite with two very different women: Hannah, a loud Korean-American, and Angela, a shy and religious African American. The book’s plot is structured as a series of loosely related chronological episodes that define Selin’s interactions with other people and the world around her.
The novel opens with the narrator’s arrival to Harvard College for orientation week in 1995. Selin’s mother is a researcher at a local university and is dating an American man.
Her parents are divorced and her father lives in Florida with his new wife and young son. The narrator, Selin, is a first-generation Turkish-American woman who grew up in a New Jersey suburb, but has extended family in Turkey who she visits every summer with her mother. The novel closely follows one year in the life of a college freshman.
The Idiot was a finalist for the 2018 Pulitzer Prize in fiction. Currently a staff writer for the New York Times, Batuman has received multiple literary awards, such as the Whiting Writers’ Award, the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, and the Paris Review Terry Southern Prize for Humor.
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