Either/Or

by Elif Batuman

I realized, as I read, that I had wanted the girl to turn out to be less interested in Young Werther than in her own goals and activities, and for that to be why he had to kill himself. This was not the case. In fact, the girl, Charlotte, had no goals or activities, other than nursing sick people. You never found out if she even liked Werther, because she had already promised her sick mother that she would marry some other guy, and because she was “virtuous,” meaning that Werther himself didn’t expect or want her to change her mind.

His self-worth had never been on the line. He hadn’t been rejected, after careful consideration, on account of having an insufficiently impressive soul. For this reason, I didn’t count The Sorrows of Young Werther as a book about how men were just as incapacitated by heartbreak as women.

What was the role of chance in literature? The realist novel was predicated on the contingency of everyday life, laying out in its opening pages the accidents of the characters’ birth to a particular historical, geographic, and social milieu. Characters were no longer allegorical, or social types. They were doomed to have “personalities.”

I asked if he believed in the Ural-Altaic language family: a theory about how Finnish, Hungarian, Turkish, Korean, and Japanese were related to each other. Linguists stopped believing it in the 1960s, but I thought it might be true, because of all the similarities I had noticed between Hungarian and Turkish grammar. Juho said that he had had a similar experience when he studied Japanese.

One question in the ethics seminar was how to weigh the benefit of a slight improvement in the present quality of life for millions of people, against a risk of great harm to millions of people who hadn’t been born yet. It was complicated because, if you improved the present quality of life, then more people would have children—meaning that the people you were potentially harming in the future were people who might not otherwise have been born, so maybe you had still done them a favor. A lot of ethical questions were related to failing to cause people to be born. Was it morally wrong to not have a child, if you knew she would be happy? Was it morally wrong to have a child when you were fourteen, instead of later, if you knew that the later child would be happier? What if you knew that most of her life would be happy, but the last five years would be extremely unhappy?

Nonetheless, the ethics seminar always left me feeling dissatisfied and anxious. “Quality of life”: as if we knew it, and could measure it. I wanted to know what it was: the quality of life.

If anyone said “the Ukraine,” instead of “Ukraine,” or assumed that some word in Ukrainian was the same as in Russian, or asked whether a Ukrainian writer wrote in Russian, it was enough to push them over the edge. This kind of touchiness was familiar to me from Turkish people, and gave me a fond, protective feeling.

The Armenian genocide was something I had been hearing about from American people’s parents since I was in elementary school. It was often the first thing they brought up: either a carpet they had bought, or, defiantly, “Jim’s brother-in-law is Armenian,” or “Our pediatrician is Greek.” I had never heard any Turkish people say anything bad about Armenians, and I knew how much American people loved to talk about “ethnic hatreds,” so I had always assumed it was just one of their fixations and didn’t reflect anything real. It was a disappointment to learn that such petitions actually existed.

(What even differentiated a great and honorable war, where you were trying to secure some land by murdering people, from a shameful genocide, where you were trying to secure some land by murdering people?)

The basic idea of the letter was how irretrievably it compromised her, just by existing. How, by writing it, she had put herself totally in Onegin’s power, entrusted herself to his honor.

I couldn’t believe it said that: “think and think about one thing.” That was all I had wanted, too.

Pushkin said that some readers would condemn Tatiana—they would call her impulsive or unseemly. But those readers weren’t being truthful. What they really meant was that Tatiana wasn’t strategic. She didn’t know how to play games. “The coquette reasons coolly; Tatiana in dead earnest loves and unconditionally yields.” I loved Tatiana, because she didn’t hide what she felt, and I loved Pushkin for calling out the kind of people who conflated discretion and virtue.

You still met people like that: people who acted as if admitting to any feelings of love, before you had gotten a man to buy you stuff, was a violation—not of pragmatism, or even of etiquette, but of morality. It meant you didn’t have self-control, you couldn’t delay gratification, you had failed the stupid marshmallow test. Ugh. I refused to believe that dissimulation was more virtuous than honesty. If there were rewards you got from lying, I didn’t want them.

This was consonant with how women in my family talked about “our” shared character. In matters of love, we were too smart and honest to play games. We could only be happy with the kind of man who didn’t need some huge charade. The men who needed a charade, though more numerous, weren’t worth bothering with. Not only was it impossible for us to attract them, because we were...

The reason she behaved in this way was because a man had paid more attention to another woman—to the kind of woman who played games. And good riddance: clearly, the man had been intimidated by our intelligence and honesty.

It was a relief to find Pushkin corroborating what my relatives had always said: that it was better to be smart and honest than to play games.

On the whole, I thought, I had been right to write to Ivan. Just by typing some words on a computer, I had caused so many things to happen in the world—sleep to be lost, plane tickets to be bought, money to change hands. In a way, it had been a test of what a person could achieve just through writing. But there were also times when I worried that I had acted foolishly and without dignity.

It had always been part of my identity to feel more objective than either of my parents—to be able to choose between their views, to retain the parts I found useful and discard the rest.

I had mixed feelings about this beautiful nonsmoker. On the one hand, I despised her for talking so much and saying so little, and for seeming so unaware of Riley’s expression. On the other hand, at least she was talking with enthusiasm about something that she liked to do, alone, just for the sake of having an experience, or thinking of herself a certain way.

I felt shocked, realizing that I had somehow grouped them together—because of their beauty, and because they seemed to inhabit a similar social persona: that of a magical fairy, inviting others to share in her bewilderment at her own mystery and specialness.

In these words, I caught a glimmer of some possibility of freedom. I realized that my inability to do what he was talking about—to disguise the people I knew and turn them into fictional “characters”—had been the biggest problem I had in writing, and thus in my plan of life. In some way it was a bigger problem than Ivan—or maybe Ivan was a part of that problem, which had predated him by many years.

I had wanted to become a novelist before I even knew how to read, back when I could only consume books by having them read to me, and none of them seemed long enough. They left too many questions unanswered, too many ramifications unexplored.

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.

I already had my hands full writing about the people I actually knew, and all the things they said. That was what I needed writing for. Now I had to invent extra people and think of things for them to say?

It turned out that writing what you were already thinking about wasn’t creative, or even writing. It was “navel-gazing.” To be obsessed by your own life experience was childish, egotistical, unartistic, and worthy of contempt. I tried to get around the problem by ascribing my own thoughts and observations to a fictional character—one with a neutral, universal name, because I didn’t want to seem like I was constantly harping on being Turkish.

Furthermore, I knew that the kidney stone and the tripe soup weren’t, in themselves, a story; I couldn’t just copy them down and call it creative writing. I had to identify the universal human situation they represented, and develop it, using my imagination.

The creative writing class ended, and theoretically I never had to read or write about diners again. But the seed of panic had been planted. My eyes had been opened to the dissimilarity between the kind of writing I was always doing, and an actual novel.

How compact, self-contained, and mysterious they were; how little they disclosed of him, whoever he was, an English-language writer with the name “Kazuo Ishiguro.” How compassionate and imaginative of him to write novels about either super-English-sounding people living in a country house in England in the 1930s (who could not have been named Kazuo Ishiguro), or super-Japanese-sounding printmakers in Osaka in the 1940s (who could not have written a novel in English). Ishiguro wrote first-person, but the narrator was always “unreliable,” i.e., crazy or ignorant, and different from the author. What discipline—what lack of pride! All I was ever trying to do when I wrote, I realized, was to show how much I saw and understood.

It was what I had been counting on, in order to get out: my sense of being a good writer. My stomach sank with the knowledge of how wrong I had been.

The whole time everything had been happening with Ivan, I had always been writing about it in my notebook, or on the computer, and sometimes I wondered whether I would ever turn those pages into a novel. The thought made me feel ashamed. It felt shameful to be so unartistic and self-obsessed, to not want to invent richly fictional characters. It felt shameful to write a whole book about Ivan. What if he found out?

“Don’t put this in your novel.” That, too, had always made me laugh, though there was an underlying assumption that was somehow troubling: that the disorder you experienced in your childhood was somehow to your credit, or capitalizable upon in later life—even though, or precisely because, it was a discredit to your mother. So your credit and your mother’s credit were somehow at odds.

“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.

All the work-arounds I thought I had invented—turning two real people into one “fictional” “character,” turning one real person into two characters, changing people’s appearances and nationalities—he already knew about, and viewed as base tricks. He seemed proud of not changing anything, including himself. Was that something it was OK to feel self-righteous about? Was it possible that the kind of book he was describing could somehow be better than the novels I already knew about—better than “psychological literature, with all its fictitious plots”? More pressingly: Was there a way that I could become a novelist, after all?

What if I could use the aesthetic life as an algorithm to solve my two biggest problems: how to live, and how to write novels? In any real-life situation, I would pretend I was in a novel, and then do whatever I would want the person in the novel to do. Afterward, I would write it all down, and I would have written a novel, without having had to invent a bunch of fake characters and pretend to care about them.

Why did that happen to people? Was anyone even studying this stuff? Was anyone doing anything to fix it?

Ivan had said things like that: “maybe we never really understood each other, maybe we never had a real conversation.” I thought this was absurd. But his viewpoint invalidated mine. If one person thought it was a conversation, and the other person thought it wasn’t a conversation, the second person was right.

That was what Ivan was doing: judging a posteriori, acting as if everything between us had run some inevitable course. How unjust it was, when people treated the actual as limiting proof of the possible! I felt that this was what I was fighting against, and always had been: the tyranny of the particular, arbitrary way that things happened to have turned out.

She thought it over. “He could have tried to be a force of stability in her life, and avoided getting romantically involved with her.” I felt a pang. I hadn’t wanted Ivan to be a force of stability in my life.

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?

What Svetlana felt for Scott, she said, wasn’t a crush, but love. “A crush is about building up the self, and love is about giving from the self. For love, you have to have a self you’re secure with, to give to the other person.” I silently absorbed the implication that what I felt for Ivan was only a crush, because I didn’t have a self I was secure with.

The rest of the poem was about how regrets came later, but for now there was just “pleasure, pain, supposed love, / And just being in his arms.” What were the regrets that came later? Was it that she had thought he loved her, and then it turned out he didn’t? It couldn’t be that, again—could it? Was that what everything was about?

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.

But I knew I was being childish and unrealistic, and Svetlana was right. 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.

But then I remembered that he had Ph.D.s in both chemistry and physics, meaning that he had some body of knowledge and accomplishment that I couldn’t imagine having, and must be using it to make choices I didn’t understand, either. When I looked over at him, he was staring at the sky with his usual peaceful expression—swaying slightly, but not seeming especially bothered by anything.

After all, if everyone’s behavior was visibly consistent with what their attitude was supposed to be, then faith would be unnecessary.

Surely, whatever rule anyone thought of, there would be some situations where it wouldn’t work. I myself had often had the experience of being prevented, by my life situation, from following some rule that made sense for everyone else. When I explained it, people would laugh and say, “How could we have thought of that?”

My heart seized up with fear, because it was as if he didn’t know me, and everything had been erased, and nothing had been real—but then I remembered how he had written that he felt like there were many Selins, and I understood that he was asking which one he was talking to, and this filled me with a feeling of lightness and freedom, because he was letting me choose—he was asking me to choose.

Why was it that one’s female relatives always said that, when a woman said or did anything inexplicable—that it was because of jealousy? If you pointed out, “But I, or you, did practically the same thing once, and we weren’t jealous,” they would say: “We’re different from other people.”