Readers who loved the intellectual musings of The Idiot, Elif Batuman's first novel, will be happy to know that Selin, its heroine, is back for her sophomore year at Harvard in Either/Or. Batuman borrowed a title from Dostoevsky earlier; this time it's Kierkegaard. In autumn 1996, Selin, a student of Russian literature, picks up a copy of Kierkegaard's classic and reads its famous line: "Either, then, one is to live aesthetically or one is to live ethically." She finds that concept "tremendously compelling"--a life dedicated to art instead of having kids and making money. And with that, Batuman and Selin begin another exploration of sex, literature and philosophy. It's the continuation of the story of an apprentice writer struggling to turn acquaintances into fictional creations and wondering if her work is imaginative or dully appropriative.
Interspersed among cultural references that range from André Breton to Frog and Toad are the people Selin knows and their effect on her life. There's Ivan, the math student with whom she is not so secretly infatuated; the classmates whose sexual experiences make Selin lament her lack thereof; her supportive mother; and citizens she meets on a trip to Turkey. Even readers who feel Flaubert was closer to the mark than Kierkegaard when he counseled being orderly in one's life in order to be fierce and original in one's work--as if it's not a question of either/or--will savor this novel. Either/Or is that rare second novel that is superior to the first. --Michael Magras, freelance book reviewer