Now a staff writer for the New Yorker, Batuman, like Selin, grew up in a Turkish family in New Jersey and attended Harvard. The implication was that it was somehow naive to want to talk about anything interesting, or to think that you would ever know anything important." In other words, everyone understands the silent decree that if you are going to extract any useful information from a novel, it should be about something less frivolous than love (Selin's mother's analysis, for example, might not help us account for the significance of the "tremendous amount of wheat" immortalized in Woody Allen's Love and Death). Her early samplings of literature classes feel frustrating precisely because of the serious-reader hurdle: "You wanted to know why Anna had to die, and instead they told you that nineteenth-century Russian landowners felt conflicted about whether they were really a part of Europe. Selin has a lot of time to contemplate this sort of problem because she is in college: The novel begins with her arrival as an undergraduate at Harvard.
"Kitty made the right choice, and Anna made the wrong choice, right?" It's not an unimportant question, and neither is the one that lurks beneath it: What does a novel "really mean" (a favorite phrase for Selin's mother), and what is it for? "Is Tolstoy saying that it's better for women to be with men like Levin?" Batuman's nonfictional mother asks her. Like a few other minor details in The Idiot (for instance, a "leg contest" in which the narrator must grade the lower halves of a group of pubescent boys in a remote Eastern European village), this mother and her practical take on Tolstoy also appear in Batuman's 2010 essay collection, The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them.
Levin, by contrast, was awkward, boring, and kind of a pain, seemingly more interested in agriculture than in Kitty, but in fact he was a more reliable partner because in the bottom of his heart he didn't really like women. Vronsky made Anna feel good about herself, at first, because he loved women so much, but he didn't love her in particular enough, so she had to kill herself. Men who liked women (Vronsky, Oblonsky) and men who didn't really like women (Levin).
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