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Boots!

Where would we be without boos?

Where would we be without good-nosed to bird?

It's a rhetorical question, sir, but where would we be without books?

From KCRW and KCRW.com, I'm Michael Silverblatt, and welcome to Bookworm.

Today I have, as my guest, Elif Batuman, she was with us when her first book, a book of essays called The Possessed, came out.

Now, no slacker in her pursuit of Dostoevsky in titles. She's written a novel, her first novel.

It's called The Idiot. It has an absolutely beautiful pale pink cover, an art teacher who looking at the portfolio of the main character says, aren't these a little girlish?

Yeah.

And she answers, well, it's not so long ago that I was a little girl.

Yeah, but for me, it is a long time ago. I'm going to turn 40 in a couple months, and this is the first novel, and I saw the pink, and I thought, you know, because there's a lot of pink in the book, too, in that art class where the teacher calls her little girl, as she ends up doing a whole project that involves covering her room with bright pink paper. That's right. That's right. A pink hotel.

Yeah, it's to look like a pink hotel. Actually, a lot of the book was about her. I mean, the reason

that pink hotel was this oppressive place, not the reason why, because of course, like all

things in books, it's overdetermined. But one of the interpretations for that is how

constrained she felt by femininity and girlishness and all of these things that you're supposed

to do and by the romance plot.

And by being caught there in her freshman year at Harvard as an 18-year-old who's been

in certain ways, the book is very careful about keeping this subtle,

but she's been put into connection with other students, young people who are the children of immigrants.

And there's a crazy sense in which Harvard is calibrating them as having something to teach one another.

To teach each other, yes.

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