"Either/Or" by Elif Batuman

Either/Or is a sequel to Batuman's The Idiot, which followed her Turkish-American protagonist, Selin, as she navigated her first year at Harvard and her feelings for the Hungarian student Ivan. Either/Or moves on to Selin's sophomore year, as she ponders over her feelings for Ivan and, more broadly, how she wants to live her life.

Anyone with any negative stereotypes of what Harvard students might be like will have all their worst prejudices confirmed. Selin and her classmates are privileged and pretentious, full of eye-rolling metaphysical philosophy. Their lives are easy, their petty concerns swathed in the language of the academic elite. I believe in the value of a liberal arts education, but Selin is studying Russian literature, for goodness' sake! 

And yet I not only enjoyed the book, but I found it immensely resonant. Partly because I, too, was once a privileged, pretentious, and shallow college student, but also because Selin's questions of a life well-lived matter to us all. Yes, those are questions that can only be considered with the leisure time her social status allows, and her questions don't necessarily lead to real answers or concrete actions, but still we all want to know who we are and who we want to be. 

For Selin, this means navigating her complicated feelings about relationships and sex, particularly when it comes to her independence from or subjection to men. Selin feels pressure to subvert some of herself in order to make herself attractive to men, and she's puzzled over her attitudes toward sex after she perfunctorily loses her virginity to a man she barely knows.

In the last part of the novel, Selin travels to her family's home country of Turkey to do research and write for a travel guide. Unlike in America, Selin is hounded by Turkish men eager to sleep with her, and she navigates a series of relationships--some positive, some borderline abusive. When she finally leaves Turkey, she feels freer and more self-reliant than she has the rest of the novel. She makes her own decisions, less weighted by the fixation she's had on various men. 

The character arc is interesting in and of itself, but it's Batuman's prose that really gets me. Many of the paragraphs are off-hand observations or questions, or simply documentation of the quirks of life that make a day a day. Selin (and Batuman) are thoughtful and keen observers, the kind of people you want to engage in conversation with. I'd happily follow her even if she just sat in her dorm room reading the whole year.