Our Take
Elif Batuman's debut novel is a wry, deceptively simple chronicle of a freshman year that manages to feel both hyper-specific to the mid-90s and timelessly true to the experience of being young, smart, and utterly lost. Selin's voice is the book's great pleasure: deadpan, curious, prone to overthinking the smallest social interactions until they become philosophical puzzles. Readers who loved My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh for its dry, unsentimental narration, or Normal People by Sally Rooney for its excruciating attention to the miscommunications of young love, will find similar pleasures here, though Batuman's humor is gentler and more absurdist. The novel's structure, built around Selin's stilted email exchanges with Ivan, cleverly mirrors the awkwardness of early internet communication and the way we perform ourselves through language before we've figured out who we are. Batuman, a linguist by training, brings real intelligence to her observations about how language shapes and distorts meaning, without ever making the book feel academic or dry. This is a book for readers who appreciate slow, interior character studies over plot, and who don't mind a narrator who spends 400 pages figuring out something as simple as whether someone likes her. Fans of campus novels and quarter-life confusion, particularly those who enjoyed The Idiot's spiritual cousin Conversations with Friends, will find a kindred, if odder, spirit.
