Elif Batuman's The Idiot and Shirley Hazzard's The Great Fire

 Elliot's Reading - September 2022

Elif Batuman’s debut novel, The Idiot (2017) - not Dostoyevsky’s, but all readers likely to read this novel get the joke& feel smart having done so - proves one thing: She’s really smart and so are most Harvard undergrads. Did you need this novel to tell you that? EB makes clear from the outset that she’s a super student - tallying all or most of her “semi-autobiographical” (read: autobiographical) freshman courses, all of which she seems to cruise through with minimal sleep and dubious nutrition. This is by no means the typical remembrance of syllabi past - as her point seems to be not that Harvard is hard going but that it’s easy going, academically - and the typical woes of such a novel involve for the most part drinking, rx, and sex - all of which are missing in the first half of the novel (as far as I’ll get with it). There’s really no notable tension - there’s a guy with whom the narrator is in love w/ from the start - but he’s a graduating senior (sigh) and, most strangely he seems to want to spend a lot of time w/ narrator although he makes it clear that he has a girlfriend and seems to show no sexual interest in the narrator whatsoever. Aside from that strange romance there no tension, crisis, obstacle in the novel, just observations and quips, many of what are really shrewd and funny. Take this for example: “The dining halls were open late for exam period. At a table near the door, two students were slumped over their books, either asleep or murdered. In a corner, a girl was staring at a stack of flash cards with incredible ferocity, as if she were going to eat them.: But such observations are not enough to carry a novel that is painfully short on conflict, crisis - it’s a Bildungsroman without the “bild.”  

Shirley Hazzard’s last (?) novel, The Great Fire (2003), at its best is exemplary of SH’s literary style: thoughtful, dense, intelligent, yet frustrating as she willfully refuses to guide the reader: a confusing array of characters many of whom go by several different names - she just doesn’t guide you at all as if she wishes her style to demand a close reading, which it does. I found myself frequently re-reading passages, even sentences, to get their full force and significance and, to her great credit, the re-reading always pays off: She’s smarter than her readers or at least than this one. Try this: “He worked late at his notes, and at midnight looked over a Japanese lesson, rereading hew sounds in undertones. At this stage, competence appeared an exciting impobability, which he went to sleep pondering.” The novel set in postwar (1947) Japan (mostly, with intervals in Hong Kong, England, New Zealand…) among mostly former British soldiers in Japan as part of the Occupation. The main character, Leith, is preparing a study of life in post-war Japan. Honestly, I wished for more about his work; I though this would be a novel in the spirit of Forster’s Passage to India, about cultures in collision. As it happens, this theme is never developed after an initial start (in Hiroshima!) and the novel becomes more Conradian, about the drift of rootless characters across the seas of Asia - but mostly among themselves. The biggest problem in The Great Fire, however, is that over the course of the narrative we find ourselves immersed in a love story: Leith falls in love with the beautiful by all accounts Harriet - who is I think precisely half his age - he 34 and she 17, and a young and inexperienced 17 at that. I found their whole relationship creepy and unlikely to succeed, with Leith’s gushing, effusive missives to her from across the globe just putting me on edge. Sorry. Much to like here - I finished reading it, which is rarely the case these days! - but to without a sense of uneasiness, the sense that Hazzard was working unfamiliar ground here (I missed the sharp, satiric wit of her earlier fiction such as Cliffs of Fall) and never quite drew the various strands together.