It is a rejoinder to the pressure on literature to serve as self-help, to make us empathetic or better informed, to be useful. It lopes along like a highbrow episode of “Louie,” a series of silly, surreal, confident riffs about humiliations, minor and major. “For human interest, skillful storytelling, humor and insightful reflection on the historical moment, I find the average episode of ‘This American Life’ to be 99 percent more reliable than the average new American work of literary fiction.” “The Idiot,” a hefty, gorgeous, digressive slab of a book, is in many ways the embodiment of this essay. programs have propagated a puritan preoccupation with “craft,” she wrote in the London Review of Books in 2010, with whittling tidy, teachable, forgettable books while leaving the work of the novel - “the juxtaposition of personal narrative with the facts of the world and the facts of literature” - to memoirs and essays. “The Idiot” is Batuman’s new novel, and it follows a number of her entertaining broadsides on contemporary fiction.

Michel Houellebecq’s “Submission” inspired an essay on head scarves “Gone Girl,” a bleak and very funny piece on marriage. A staff writer for The New Yorker, she continues to report from this territory, where political or romantic ideals battle it out with shabby realities, and her investigations are frequently sparked by fiction. Petersburg, to mastering old Uzbek, with its 70 words for duck and 100 words for crying. In “The Possessed,” Batuman detailed how her obsession with Russian novels carried her afield - to graduate school, to Samarkand and St.

Novels are about other novels - and how they make us suffer, she wrote in her 2010 essay collection, “The Possessed: Adventures With Russian Books and the People Who Read Them.” They are about “the protagonist’s struggle to transform his arbitrary, fragmented, given experience into a narrative as meaningful as his favorite books.” Thomas Jefferson blamed literature for encouraging “a bloated imagination, sickly judgment and disgust towards all the real businesses of life.” But it is this very power - to inspire us to insist a flock of sheep is an opposing army - that is literature’s true subject, according to the critic and journalist Elif Batuman. The novel’s ability to seduce readers with its alternate, and invariably more attractive, versions of reality was much lamented in the 19th century. Jo March - unforgivably - marriage to an insufferable pedant and surrender of all creative ambitions. Emma Bovary to debt, seedy affairs and protracted death by arsenic. Don Quixote succumbs to delusions, debt and sundry humiliations. Consider the fates of our most famous bibliomaniacs. $27.Ī strange thing about novels is how often, and strenuously, they proclaim the dangers of novel-reading.

The idiot elif batuman sparknotes