 | A WRITER'S WIT |
New Yorker Fiction 2017
Rating the Story
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** —Above Average [one-sentence description]
* —Average [one-sentence description]
Stephen Doyle ***January 23, 2017, Elif Batuman, “Constructed Worlds”: Selin, an eighteen-year-old Turkish-American, reveals her life as she enters university in the mid 1990s. ¶ I love this story, if for no other reason than the author captures a character’s freshman year at a prestigious university. And, of course, the magic is all in the details, beginning with the fact that Selin’s frosh year is concurrent with the emergence of e-mail, over twenty years ago. Each section of the story, for a while, anyway, chronicles her five classes, one of which is an art class called Constructed Worlds, in which an embittered male professor talks about the phoniness of museums. Ah, the true semester (eighteen weeks), when finals “were after the [Christmas] vacation instead of before” (65). The story ends subtly—there is no traditional arc, much like many semesters—with Selin’s train ride back to Harvard from New Jersey, seeing a friend on the train, and her frenetic studying for finals in the university library:
“At two in the morning, the library closed and I walked home through the fresh snow. The clouds had cleared, revealing the stars. Light from even a nearby star was four years old by the time it reached your eyes. Where would I be in four years? I thought about it for a long time, but somehow I couldn’t picture it. I couldn’t picture any part of it at all” (65).
Selin, in spite of all her brilliance, is a typical freshman, with one eye on the present but one eye on the future. Where is all this hard work taking me? Batuman’s novel, The Idiot, is out in March.
Illustration by Stephen Doyle
NEXT TIME: My Book World
Illustration by Stephen Doyle
NEXT TIME: My Book World
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