Either/Or

by Elif Batuman

I, too, had friends who found each other annoying and incomprehensible, and some of them really could be annoying, but they all struck me in a certain way—and that was why I liked them, that was why I loved them.

Thinking of the people who populated my life, who acted, spoke, and viewed the world so differently—Mesut, Juho, Lakshmi, Riley, and all the others—I recognized how important it was for me that I could understand them all, at least a little bit, and better than they could understand each other. Was that what a novel was: a plane where you could finally juxtapose all the different people, mediating between them and weighing their views?

In fact, Henry James said, Isabel was not and never had been writing a book. She “had no desire to be an authoress,” “no talent for expression,” and “none of the consciousness of genius,” having only “a general idea that people were right when they treated her as if she were rather superior.” It was one of the few places where Henry James was mean about Isabel. Well, it made sense. If she could write a book, he would be out of a job. That’s why Madame Bovary had to be too dumb and banal to write Madame Bovary: so Flaubert could have a great humane moment where he said he was Madame Bovary.

Nobody was going to trick me into marrying some loser, and even if they did, I would write the goddamn book myself.

He marveled at “how absolutely, how inordinately, the Isabel Archers, and even much smaller female fry, insist on mattering,” and acted as if he was some kind of visionary for even thinking of writing a whole book about someone like that. I started to feel the combined annoyance and exhilaration that sometimes came over me on airplanes. You could tell that Henry James wasn’t actually dumb, or a jerk. So how didn’t he realize he was sounding like a jerk?

Nowhere in the preface did Henry James say why he hadn’t found his own life interesting enough to write about.

But I was more fortunate. I was going to remember, or discover, where everything came from. I was going to do the subtle, monstrous thing where you figured out what you were doing, and why.

their meaning, and for the most part their horror, rose before her with a kind of architectural vastness.

when all the different things that Ivan had said and written had come flooding back to me, assuming a new shape, bigger than I had suspected. It was happening again now: some pieces of some larger story that I could barely make out were flying into new positions, and I was remembering things I had forgotten, and putting them together differently, and all while I was sitting still and not going anywhere or doing anything—though in another way I was hurtling north at five hundred miles an hour.

In the past, I had been in one country or another because of other people: my parents, Svetlana, Ivan, Sean. But I was in Russia because I had looked at the literatures of the world and made a choice. Nobody had especially wanted me to come—indeed, the customs officer who stamped my passport had left a distinct impression of wishing me to be elsewhere—yet here I was. It was like when Isabel managed not to marry the guy with the cotton mills, and it was her first taste of victory—because “she had done what she preferred.” Was this the decisive moment of my life? It felt as if the gap that had dogged me all my days was knitting together before my eyes—so that, from this point on, my life would be as coherent and meaningful as my favorite books. At the same time, I had a powerful sense of having escaped something: of having finally stepped outside the script.