The Idiot by Elif Batuman
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Facebook Bound

I knew I should have kept a diary after I left secondary school. Not that I had experienced anything extraordinary in my young adulthood, but it could have proved useful for writerly gaps in later life. On the other hand if my diary was as tedious and banal as Batuman’s, I would have destroyed it as an embarrassing mistake.

To say that The Idiot is pointless might sound severe. Batuman writes grammatical sentences and believable dialogue. But the sentences and dialogue drone on endlessly about whatever happened to be around in her young adult life.

I suppose that someone of a similar age, perhaps embarking on an educational adventure like Harvard and experiencing Paris for the first time, would find The Idiot instructive and even interesting. For anyone else the autobiographical detail is likely to be as enthralling as a 19th century cookbook.

It did just strike me however: Perhaps Batuman is more important than I realize. Forget the old fashioned idea of the diary. What’s she’s done is to take a few years worth of anticipatory Facebook or Instagram posts and turned them into a book. So perhaps ‘welcome’ to a new genre. Please don’t let it be...

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