Originally published in print September 2022.

This article references sexual assault. 

In Either/Or by Elif Batuman, novels lead our protagonist into harm’s way. This much anticipated sequel to 2017’s The Idiot follows the sophomore year of Harvard student Selin in the late 1990s. Either/Or is a piece of autofiction and as such recounts the process by which both Selin and Batuman were negatively affected by classic novels from Eugene Onegin to Nadja. 

Why then would Batuman choose to write the story of Either/Or as a novel rather than a memoir? Batuman has responded that recounting her own life and memories is an inherently imaginative exercise. Perhaps memoir, as a genre, only matters insofar as verifiable facts matter. When the facts of a person’s circumstance or experience define a story, the memoir shines. Chanel Miller was assaulted by Brock Turner in 2015. This assault and the trial then media and Stanford University’s misrespresentations and mishandling of the assault and trial matter for Miller’s vital advocacy for her own personhood, reform of instutional responses to sexual assault, and wider issues of consent and misogyny addressed in her acclaimed 2019 memoir Know My Name. 

But Either/Or does not have such a clear relation to truth. Selin experiences incidents of sexual violence and discomfort within Either/Or true to Batuman’s experience, so why not write about them as a ‘true story?’ Either/Or is not anti-fact. Selin’s work in Turkey for the ‘Let’s Go’ travel guide is largely to update and verify the travel guide so it can remain factual. However, Either/Or is aware that solitary facts are meaningless. Rather, facts tell stories and beg questions. In Selin’s work for ‘Let’s Go’, she doesn’t know what to do with the facts she is presented with. She finds herself torn between Turkish and American ideas of (ethically and aesthetically) good travel. Asking questions becomes a practice of freedom for Selin even when she’s at her lowest. In some sense, questioning and imagining come second to truth in the novel’s liberatory mission.  

I am reminded of a passage from Maggie Nelson’s On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint. She writes,

‘Interpretation is never a static activity; very rarely does one story “stick” throughout a life. As we go along, we often find the stories we have been telling ourselves don’t work any longer; we find we need to change them, so that they can do different work for us, accommodate new sets of knowledge and insight. It is in this sense that there is no such thing as a true story. This does not mean that all facts are fungible, nor does it mean that we don’t each have a right to our own stories. It just means that the events of our lives will appear differently to us at different times, and that our attraction, aversion, or indifference to objects, people, or events is always conditioned by our state of mind…

We tend to grow tired of our stories over time; we tend to learn from them what they have to teach, then bore of their singular lens. I see [Monica] Lewinsky’s shifting take on her story as a practice of freedom in its own right, a claim on an indeterminacy unopposed to clarity.’

Similarly, in Either/Or, freedom is practised through shifting moments of  interpretation. The novel resists rigid and prescriptive stories. Selin’s questions and observations build as they are exposed to a variety of narratives. In a short ‘False Starts’ interview with Granta after the release of The Idiot, Batuman explains that telling stories is how we process the ‘data dump of information’ that is ‘actual unmediated reality.’ The existence of an ‘actual unmediated reality’ suggests there are many mediated realities created by stories, in which some ‘truth gets lost.’ In The Unreality of Memory Elisa Gabbert refers to a short story by Madeline Yale Wynne named The Little Room, about the seemingly changing imaginings and realities of a room in a Vermont home, writing that, 

‘You could say the story is about unreliable memory, the ultimate unknowability of the past, the impossibility of securing a single version of the truth. But it doesn’t feel that way when you are reading it; it feels like the house in Vermont belongs to two realities. You don’t know which reality you’re in until you open the door.’

Either/Or could have also been about all those things. However, by writing from young Selin’s perspective, Batuman has made the novel belong to its own reality in which the world is questioned and interpreted, against other realities, from that particular perspective. Within the reality of the novel more narrative realities are created, including Svetlana’s. Svetlana maintains that Selin is destined to live an aesthetic life as opposed to her ethical life. This, of course, mirrors Kierkegaard’s Either/Or, from which the novel takes its name. While Svetlana’s ‘ethical’ life leads her to be content with a life of meaningless conversation, Selin’s ‘aesthetic’ year plays out as if it were modelled on the books of the European literary canon. 

Possibly the greatest selling point of Either/Or and The Idiot is that they are brilliantly funny. Selin’s dry wit underpins Either/Or’s more meta-textual themes and critiques. It is often remarked that comedy is tragedy with distance, or specificity (truth) exaggerated (untruth). It is funny to see someone so inquisitive and astute searching for someone to tell her how to live. (Tragedy with distance?) In this sense, comedy cannot commit to being Either/Or. It only happens at the intersections of the aesthetic and the ethical, the real and the unreal, the merging of realities. 

At the end of the novel, Selin scorns Henry James and Gustave Flaubert’s writing on behalf of supposedly banal or talentless women. Instead, Selin ‘would write the goddamn book myself.’ In the final moments, the multiple realities inside and outside the book collapse together as Selin rejects a life dictated by others and Batuman’s own voice pierces through Selin’s narration. It becomes clear why Either/Or had to be a novel and not a memoir. As Selin arrives in Russia, at last stepping ‘outside the script’, I smile. Batuman wrote the goddamn book herself.