54 pages • 1 hour read
Elif BatumanEither/Or
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2022A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Authorial Context: Elif Batuman
Elif Batuman is a contemporary American author, academic, and journalist. She holds an MA in literature from Harvard College and a PhD in comparative literature from Stanford University. She is currently a staff writer at the New Yorker. Either/Or is her third book: She previously published The Idiot (2018) and The Possessed: Adventures With Russian Books and the People Who Read Them (2010). Although a first-generation Turkish American, Batuman has expressed resistance to the idea of placing her work within the specific context of a Turkish-American literary tradition, and she notes her dislike for authors whose works become “about” their ethno-national identities. Batuman is deeply interested in “classic” literature, with a particular focus on Russian-authored texts. Her own writing, much like the works of short fiction and novels that she finds compelling, is introspective and character driven. In both The Possessed and Either/Or, she expresses the belief that the novel is fundamentally “about” the desire of the protagonist to bring a sense of order, meaning, and coherence to their own experiences that is reminiscent of their favorite novels. Batuman’s writing should be read through this lens and understood as a fictionalized, literary representation of her own alter ego. Indeed, many of the experiences she writes about in The Possessed, which bridges the gap between memoir, essay, and literary criticism, appear in a fictionalized form in The Idiot and Either/Or. The character of Ivan, her work for Let’s Go, and her time volunteering in a small Hungarian village are among the features of her novels that are rooted in her own college experiences.
Batuman is interested in what her character, Selin, terms the “human condition.” The author has had a lifelong curiosity about how authors in general develop particular characters and how those characters interact with one another. That curiosity extends to how authors transform the people they know into complex, multifaceted fictional characters. Batuman has written about her mother’s frequent admonishment to “not put” a particular conversation or interaction into her books. Sure enough, many of Batuman’s main characters draw from friends, classmates, and family members. The character of Selin looks to literature to understand not only her own life but also societal expectations of how she should act and interact with others. Here, too, art imitates life, as Batuman herself is interested in the extent to which she has been guided by literature in her own decisions and interactions. At the age of 38, Batuman stopped dating men, and she has written about how authors like Adrienne Rich helped her to understand her own queer identity. She has noted that her transition from dating men to dating women affected her writing, and there are moments of queer identification and desire not only in this text but also in The Idiot.
Series Context: The Idiot
Either/Or is a sequel to The Idiot (2018) and continues the first novel’s bildungsroman story of the character Selin’s experiences as a literature student at Harvard College. Either/Or contains many characters, storylines, tropes, and motifs that first appeared in The Idiot, and the two novels should be understood as different installments in the same narrative. The Idiot details Selin’s freshman year at Harvard College and the summer before sophomore year, which she spends, at Ivan’s suggestion, teaching English in a small town in Hungary. Her friendship with Svetlana begins in The Idiot, and the novel begins to develop the characters of Ivan and her mother. Additionally, The Idiot marks the start of her deep interest in literary analysis.
Selin’s relationship with Ivan, although alluded to in Either/Or, is fully detailed in The Idiot. The two meet in the same introductory Russian language class in which Selin also meets Svetlana; their relationship begins when Selin spontaneously sends Ivan a funny, mysterious email referencing “Nina in Siberia,” a work of short fiction written specifically for students in beginning Russian courses. The story’s protagonist is a Russian woman named Nina who is slighted by her boyfriend and ultimately discovers that he has left her for another woman. There are several parallels to Selin and Ivan’s quasi-love story in this short story, and the way that Selin looks for analytical touchstones in texts to help explain her life emerges as a key part of the thematic structure of The Idiot that extends into Either/Or.
Selin’s email initiates a relationship in correspondence: She and Ivan message back and forth, and their emails always follow the same cryptic pattern. They are devoid of small talk and real details about Selin’s and Ivan’s lives, and for this reason, the campus therapist points out to Selin that she does not really know anything about “the real” Ivan, nor does he know anything about her. In spite of this, Selin falls for Ivan, and eventually they begin to meet in person. Selin is never sure what Ivan’s true intentions toward her are. He is hard to read, and she cannot tell if his feelings toward her are romantic. Svetlana and her mother are dubious about Ivan and far less trusting than Selin. When Ivan suggests that Selin spend part of her summer in Hungary teaching for his friend’s program so that she might visit him in Budapest, her mother initially balks. Selin and Ivan do explicitly discuss the nature of their relationship from time to time, but their communication is fraught. Their summer, too, involves conflict, and Either/Or begins not long after Selin has returned from Hungary.
Selin’s interest in language also features prominently in The Idiot. She is drawn to the Russian language because she loves Russian literature, although at this point, she has read the works of Pushkin, Tolstoy, and others only in translation. She speaks English and Turkish, and she strikes up friendships through the Russian class with Serbian-speaking Svetlana and Hungarian-born Ivan. In the same way that she looks to literature as a pathway to understanding the “human condition” and as a point of reference for her own self-analysis and identity development, Selin looks to different languages for points of connection. Although cognates between Turkish and Hungarian are few and far between, she is interested when she does find them. She is passionate about Slavic languages, literature, and cultures, and her foray into Russian language classes marks an important part of her growth and development. Namely, through these classes, she begins to pursue the interest that will ultimately shape the course of her education and (hopefully) her career. Uncomfortable with the idea of an identity based on being Turkish American, Selin wants to forge her own path, and her exploration of Russian as a language and Russian literature is key to her development within the broader bildungsroman structure of the novel. Selin is a deeply analytical young woman, and her journey to adulthood is very much focused on her intellectual development. Although literary analysis is a major component of both texts, Selin’s commentary on the various books that she reads on her own and in class picks up pace in Either/Or. There, too, emerges a developmental trajectory, as Selin grows in her analytical ability between her freshman and sophomore years.
