Like Batuman was, Selin is a Turkish-American Harvard student in the mid-90s, a preternaturally precise narrator of her environment and the people who populate it. That experience-like many of Batuman’s early college experiences-made its way into Either/Or, her second novel following the undergraduate adventures of Selin Karadağ. “When I read that quote,” Batuman says, “I was like, Wait-why is Martin Amis giving pointers to Jane Austen? And it reminded me of the experience that I had reading The Rachel Papers when I was in my first or second year of college.” “The reviewer was upset that there isn’t any sex in The Idiot,” Batuman says now, remembering that the piece cited Amis as having said: “The only thing wrong with Pride and Prejudice is that there isn’t a 30-page sex scene between Lizzie Bennett and Mr. It was a review of The Idiot, her 2017 debut novel, that made Elif Batuman revisit Martin Amis’s 1973 debut novel, The Rachel Papers.
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