Either/Or

by Elif Batuman

I held my ID card in front of the reader, and the door to the computer room clicked open. I found myself remembering a book I’d read where a woman looked in a mirror for the first time after seven years in a gulag, and the face looking back wasn’t her own, but that of her mother. I immediately recognized how shameful, self-important, and obtuse it was for me, an American college student who hadn’t checked email for three months, to compare herself to a political prisoner who had spent seven years in a gulag. But it was too late—I had already thought of it.

How brief and magical it was that we all lived so close to each other and went in and out of each other’s rooms, and our most important job was to solve mysteries. The temporariness made it all the more important to do the right thing—to follow the right leads.

Nobody ever explained what was admirable about having the kids, or why it was the default course of action for every single human being. If you ever asked why any particular person had had a kid, or what good a particular kid was, people treated it as a blasphemy—as if you were saying they should be dead, or the kid should be dead. It was as if there was no way to ask what the plan had been, without implying that someone should be dead.

It seemed possible that one or both of these books might change my life.

Well, that’s just it, I thought: you didn’t just write down a raw cry of suffering. It would be boring and self-indulgent. You had to disguise it, turn it into art. That’s what literature was. That was what required talent, and made people want to read what you wrote, and then they would give you money.

She was proud of being able to borrow money at a loss from her own retirement fund, and give it to Harvard. I felt proud of her, too. But I did not feel proud of myself. It made the college application process feel, in retrospect, somehow hurtful and insulting: all the essays and interviews and supplements and letters seemed to be about you, about your specialness—but actually it was all about shaking your parents down for money.

When I read that, I almost threw up. Wasn’t that what had happened to me? Hadn’t I been brought to the point where I would sacrifice everything—only for him to leave off without the slightest advance having been made? Wasn’t I always asking myself—hadn’t other people, including a psychologist at the student center, repeatedly asked me—whether the whole thing was in my imagination?

Do you think he was specially created to destroy women? Like they send him to the West to meet women who might have become famous engineers or professors, but they don’t, because of him?”

When I persisted in talking about Ivan, the psychologist said that I was in an imaginary relationship with an unavailable person, because I was afraid to be in a real relationship with an available person.

Several questions came to my mind, like whose stingray it was, why it was in the sink, how KC had gotten into our apartment, and where Joanne was. On reflection, though, I realized none of these things was actually a problem for me, so I just went to the library.

What if you knew that most of her life would be happy, but the last five years would be extremely unhappy? I didn’t get why the extremely unhappy person wasn’t allowed to kill herself before she messed up her average.

my parents were the only ones I knew who never acted like I owed them money for being alive, or talked about kids being “spoiled” or “selfish,” or said that I had to be a doctor, or took other adults’ side over mine. I was so grateful that sometimes I sat in my room and cried.

Edmund Wilson: a grown man whom people called “Bunny.”

“I have to go,” I blurted. Everyone looked at me, so I added: “I just remembered a book I have to read.” “Sometimes these things can’t wait,” Riley said in a reasonable tone that contrasted with my mode of being. We all laughed, and I was able to make my escape.

The first line of Nadja—“Who am I?”—was just like I remembered it. The next pages were still unreadably boring. But this time, I kept going. If there was anything in there that could change my life, I wasn’t going to let a few boring pages stand in my way.

I understood that novels, unlike children’s books, were serious and important and that, just as my parents’ job was to treat patients in a hospital, so, too, was it someone’s job to write novels. Every civilized country had such people. They were in some way the very mark of civilization.

Ugh: “Ivan.” Telling anyone his name always felt like a betrayal—like I was causing the way they pronounced it, either incorrectly or with elaborate and ironic correctness, as if to imply that he was pretentious because he didn’t say “Eye-van,” the way literally nobody in the world except American people did. “When I like people immensely I never tell their names to anyone”: I read that line in The Picture of Dorian Gray, and felt the sickening lurch of dishonor.

Nadja herself didn’t show up until page 64. “Suddenly, perhaps still ten feet away, I saw a young, poorly dressed woman walking toward me. . . .” I felt a thrill of recognition. So, being poorly dressed wasn’t necessarily opposed to an aesthetic life, but could be consonant with it.

Just imagine being told that you weren’t a person, but a way you made other people behave.

Nadja had the validity of constituting at least a tiny part of the way of the world. Part of the way of the world was that women had a tendency to go crazy. Men could bring out this tendency. But to blame the men was to take sides, to lose logic, to enter the craziness of the women—because the very content of the women’s craziness was, in large part, the blameworthiness of the men.

“Everything you want right now, everything you want so passionately and think you’ll never get—you will get it someday.” I accidentally met her eyes, and it felt like she was talking to me. “Yes, you will get it,” she said, looking right at me, “but by that time, you won’t want it anymore. That’s how it happens.”

How many perfect autumns did a person get? Why did I seem always to be in the wrong place, listening to the wrong music?

Only someone who was already old and famous could say something like that—that some randomly occurring garbage was the greatest art form.

Anything about suffering mothers gave me an oppressed feeling.

“How many times a day do you and Selin see each other?” Riley asked, the third time Svetlana and I ran into her on our way to and from each other’s rooms. “Do you think it’s weird that we spend so much time together?” Svetlana asked me afterward. “It’s almost like we’re in a relationship.” “Hm . . .” I said, stalling. Weren’t we in a relationship? “This is how much time I would expect to spend with a boyfriend,” Svetlana clarified. “Oh, right,” I said.

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.

Moreover, he didn’t know if I was someone he could talk to right now, because he didn’t know who I was. It is like there are many Selins and I don’t know which one I will get. What if I meet the one who sees me as the devil?

Love wasn’t a slumber party with your best friend. Love was dangerous, violent, with an element of something repulsive; attraction had a permeable border with repulsion. Love had death in it, and madness. To try to escape those things was immature and anti-novelistic.

“I saw that your lights were on, so I thought I would knock at your door. But I decided to space the knocks very far apart, and then decrease the interval, to see how close the knocks have to be together, before they are perceived as knocking.” Riley gave me a look. “I’ll be inside,” she said.

“Teleological suspension of the ethical” meant that it was OK to murder your kid, if God told you to. It meant believing that God loved you, even if he acted like he didn’t; and believing that you loved your own kid, even if you acted like you didn’t. After all, if everyone’s behavior was visibly consistent with what their attitude was supposed to be, then faith would be unnecessary.

I felt really embarrassed about it. I probably felt too embarrassed to tell you, because I thought you’d think I was being self-important or lame. That’s probably the worst part of having a Kierkegaard-related nervous breakdown.”

The person Svetlana had eventually been able to talk to about Fear and Trembling had been Dave, whose preschool had featured a giant mural of Abraham about to murder Isaac, so he had been thinking about this stuff for years. What kind of fucked-up preschool was that? I almost asked, before reflecting that such remarks were what made people not feel comfortable telling me about their Kierkegaard-related nervous breakdowns.

“Matches?” the storekeeper asked, showing no interest in my age. I felt wonder at the matchbook: an actual little book, with a staple. For free. The thing Prometheus had paid for with his liver.

The devastating line at the end of “The Seducer’s Diary”: “If I were a god I would do for her what Neptune did for a nymph: change her into a man.” Would Ivan do that for me? YOU HAVE TO DO THAT FOR ME.

At the same time, I knew that, although nonattendance in high school was technically possible, and even expected, for most people in my position, it was somehow impossible for me, personally—because of who I was.

You didn’t hear his skills, but her evocation of them; her turning them on you. (So, it was possible to make someone else feel that way: the way someone had made you feel.)

Why did the idea of the French countryside make me feel despairing? It looked OK in Van Gogh paintings. And that was where he had cut off his ear—so it had been intense.

I sometimes went with Svetlana to Pilates—even though the logistics of mat placement was deeply stressful, in a way that made me feel like I understood the primal conflicts for land that formed the basis of modern history.

How confident the other people in the class seemed to be in the rights that had been conferred on them by being there first—which was really only a matter of luck, because their aunts hadn’t happened to call just then. Where, exactly, did they want me to go? Did they want me to just not exist? Was that how the Israelis and Palestinians felt about each other?

In theory, of course, I knew that love could be reciprocated. It was a thing that happened, often, to other people. But I was unlike other people in so many ways.

I didn’t get it: why did we have to write stuff that was hard to read and didn’t have an ending, just because men were wrong?

“It could be Selin’s Finnish friend doing a thought experiment,” Riley said. That was what she always said now, whenever we weren’t sure if something was really happening.

Was it possible that Zoloft would cause me to like rap music?

“I missed this Selin,” she said. It hadn’t occurred to me that she had missed me, too.

Great literature didn’t judge. It described complex individuals who were neither good nor bad. Oh, I knew how to get an A in English just as well as the next person.

Special, caring guys, the kind who were always talking about respecting women, never did seem interested in me. Frankly, I wasn’t their number-one fan, either.

At first, it seemed unfair to try to gain a financial advantage from being “a woman,” when things were so much easier for me than they had been for my mother and aunts. On the other hand, it was becoming increasingly clear that literally nothing was fair.

I understood that what had been revealed to me at this sadomasochism-themed party was the true face of all parties: how they were all, in one way or another, sadomasochism-themed.

Anyway, I didn’t want to be “nurtured” in an “environment” that was set up for me to “excel.” I wanted to do whatever was the most real and rigorous. Obviously, everything would be set up for boys. So what? I would work ten times harder than they did, and everyone would eventually acknowledge I was doing a better job.

In some way it seemed to me that The Unofficial Guide was the most truthful book, more so than Either/Or—because it was describing the exact concrete situations you were in, specific to time and place, and was updated every year.