The worst part of having a Kierkegaard-related nervous breakdown, according to Selin’s best friend, Svetlana, in Elif Batuman’s second novel, Either/Or, is not being able to tell people about it, lest you appear self-important. We glean the second-worst part for ourselves: the sense of existential dread that turns even the most seemingly simple decisions into philosophical ones. Throughout this novel, the sequel to 2018’s Pulitzer Prize-nominated The Idiot, Selin – our narrator – is bewildered by the mundane and fixated on the profound. Strings of passing questions are imbued with Batuman’s wit and flair – “What good was a novelty candle?” “What good was the actual Hippocrates?” “What was a Swedish twin fetish?”. One, though, is present throughout: are some lives more real than others?
At the end of The Idiot, we left Selin, a Turkish-American Harvard student studying Russian literature, in a remote village in Hungary, where she had travelled to pursue a love interest – the elusive, infuriating Ivan. In Either/Or we are back at Harvard, where she has new roommates, a new syllabus (“How I envy you in this sea of choices,” Svetlana’s mother says in non-native English, the syntax of which so fascinates Batuman), and a lingering sense of anxiety about how, despite her romantic-seeming adjournment to Eastern Europe last summer, she has still never been kissed.
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