The Idiot

The book opens with Selin, a first generation Turkish-American, arriving at Harvard as a freshman in 1995. She tells of her experiences trying to navigate orientation week, living with roommates for the first time, and signing up for seminars and extracurricular activities.

Selin’s two roommates, Hannah and Angela, are very different from each other and from Selin. The three of them live in a two-bedroom suite with a common room. Angela, having arrived earlier than anyone else, takes the single bedroom, leaving Selina and Hannah to share the other bedroom. The three women agree to rotate throughout the year, so everyone gets a chance to live in the single.

Hannah is loud and desperate to make friends, while Angela is quiet and reserved, but sweet. Hannah’s desire for noise irritates Selin at times, but she tries to empathize with her roommate after learning that Hannah’s older brother suffers from some kind of illness, which had kept their house quiet and had alienated the girl from her peers in the past.

The narrator’s attempts to join a prestigious seminar where students work with famous senior faculty are unsuccessful. She is told in one of her interviews that she is considered to be creative, but not academically inclined. Her efforts to join the orchestra are also a failure, which deeply upsets Selin. As someone who does not go to church or play sports, playing the violin in an orchestra is the closest Selin can get to feeling part of something bigger.

Eventually, one of Selin’s application to the studio art department is accepted by a visiting artist who finds her art to be “little-girlish,” but who is won over by her essay (14). The seminar is called “Constructed Worlds” and each student is asked to produce a final project that somehow reflects a world they have created. In the meantime, they discuss what kind of art is shown in museums, which works get left behind in the storage rooms, and who makes the decision between the two. The artist keeps bringing up Harvard students’ privilege and takes them to the Museum of Natural History to demand they be admitted to the storage space. All they find there are objects in need of repair.

The rest of Selin’s classes are also somewhat disappointing. She takes a nineteenth-century European literature seminar, but instead of debating the philosophical meaning behind novels, such as Anna Karenina, the professor goes on lengthy discussions of Russian landowners and nineteenth-century economy. Such an approach to literature seems boring to Selin, as she and her mother like to talk about what they perceive to be the real meaning behind stories.

As a way to optimize her schedule, Selin enrolls for a fifth class: Russian language. It is taught by an East German woman, who Russifies her original name, Barbara, into Varvara. The teacher expects a similar transformation from her students and assigns Selin the name Sonya.

An international student from Serbia, Svetlana, befriends Selin and the two women start spending time together outside of class, even when Svetlana needs to switch to a different Russian section. Svetlana’s family is wealthy but had to leave Serbia, after her father had been harassed by the state police. Her mother is an artist, but has been mentally and emotionally unwell for a long time. Svetlana also has emotional problems and regularly talks to a therapist about her relationship with her father and her sexuality.

During the first weeks on campus, Selin runs into Ralph, a young man she met the previous summer at an academic program for high school juniors. Ralph is well-behaved, clean-cut, and broad-shouldered. He is interested in government and obsessed with the Kennedy family. The two of them begin hanging out, going for food or watching films.

During Thanksgiving, Selin visits her father and his second family in Florida. She has a much younger half-brother.

Selin volunteers as an ESL teacher, but is asked to help with math, rather than English. The student she tutors seems completely uninterested in studying. Selin feels useless and frustrated trying to explain math to someone who is there only because the teacher forces them. On the way back from a tutoring session, her shuttle is in an accident, causing Selin and several other passengers to suddenly fall to the floor. After that, Selin refuses to waste any more time teaching math and insists on teaching ESL, hoping her efforts will be more successful.

In Russian class, the students work closely with a primer called Nina in Siberia, which uses only elementary grammar and vocabulary. The story follows Nina, a young physics student living in Moscow, who is engaged to a fellow student, Ivan. However, one day, Ivan disappears and when Nina goes to his home, his father shows her a letter left by the young man. Ivan tells Nina that he is going to Siberia and that she should forget him. Nina is unable to do so. Ivan’s father tells her to look for him at a communal farm in Siberia where Ivan’s uncle works. After flying to Irkutsk, Nina ends up sharing a taxi with another physics graduate student, Leonid. Neither Ivan nor his uncle are at the farm, however.

Nina eventually tracks Ivan down to his uncle’s physics lab where she encounters Leonid once again. Ivan is out in the field. In the lab, she sees a note addressed to him by another woman and feels deeply saddened. She leaves the lab without meeting Ivan, but feels unable to go back to Moscow and decides to volunteer at the communal farm. By chance, she meets one of her Moscow professors who asks her to become an assistant at Ivan’s uncle’s lab. When she sees Ivan again he apologizes and tells her he regrets leaving without any explanation. It turns out that he had fallen in love with another woman who had been engaged to Leonid at the time. They decided not to continue their relationship, but were unable to stay away from each other. Rather than being upset, Nina thanks Ivan, since his behavior prompted her to come to Siberia where she now has a great job and has fallen in love with Leonid.  

The Russian instructor makes the students memorize and re-enact scenes from the story. Selin often has to play out the dialogues with a math major senior, Ivan Varga, an international student from Hungary. Gradually, Selin begins to identify with Nina and becomes obsessed with the real-life Ivan. One day towards the end of the semester, she sends him an email mimicking the story and Ivan replies. At first, their interactions are limited to email exchanges because Ivan thinks that face-to-face conversations are banal and uninteresting. Additionally, Ivan is busy with schoolwork and grad school applications, so his replies tend to take a week or more, which makes Selin very sad, but even more obsessed with him. She spends winter break at her mother’s house in New Jersey where she feels unhappy and dispirited because of the lack of progress with Ivan.

The chapter ends with Selin coming back to campus for exams. Selin’s final project for the “Constructed Worlds” class is a story about a pink hotel room in Japan and a family who is stuck there. Hannah is impressed by the fact that Selin can write something so long and urges her to submit the text to the university literary magazine’s undergraduate fiction contest.