It’s charming at first, but too many and you might write back, “Dad, that’s enough.” Ivan said he didn’t think they could tell him anything he didn’t already know.” They’re jokes you might receive in text form from your father. Someone remarks, “I don’t think Lucky Charms work.” Later Selin observes, “In the checkout line, we both noticed a magazine called Self. This har-har brand of humor is one playful feature of Batuman’s writing. The Idiot takes place in the nineties, at a time when one might ask, “What do we do with this, hang ourselves?” while holding up an Ethernet cable. In some ways, following a year in the life of Selin was like reliving the prime of my idiocy, the crème de la crème of my naivety. Like her, I was trying (“doomed”) to be a writer. Like her, I’d gone on to teach English in another country. Like Selin, I’d fallen for a man via email while in college. I feared the narrator Selin and I had too much in common for us to ever get along. So I admit I was hesitant when I picked up a copy of Elif Batuman’s The Idiot. I was even more of an idiot back in college and I don’t like being reminded of this fact.
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