The mysterious relationship between language and the world" is just one of the questions troubling Selin Karadag, the 18-year-old protagonist of Batuman's (The Possessed) wonderful first novel, a bildungsroman Selin narrates with fluent wit and inexorable intelligence. Beginning her first year at Harvard in the fall of 1995, Selin is determined to "be a courageous person, uncowed by other people's dumb opinions"; she already thinks of herself as a writer, although "this conviction was completely independent of having ever written anything." In a Russian class, the Turkish-American Selin is befriended by the worldlier Svetlana, whose Serbian family has endowed her with capital and complexes, and the older Hungarian math major Ivan, who becomes Selin's correspondent in an exciting new medium: email. Their late-night exchanges inspire Selin more than anything else in her life, but they frustrate her, too: Ivan's intentions toward her are vague, perhaps even to himself. Traveling to Paris with Svetlana in the summer of 1996, Selin plans to continue on to Hungary, where she will teach English in a village school, and then to Turkey, where her extended family resides. Thus Batuman updates the grand tour travelogue just as she does the epistolary novel and the novel of ideas, in prose as deceptively light as it is ambitious. One character wonders whether it's possible "to be sincere without sounding pretentious," and this long-awaited and engrossing novel delivers a resounding yes. (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

THE IDIOT, by Elif Batuman. (Penguin, $16.) This loosely autobiographical novel - which our reviewer, Parul Sehgal, called "a hefty, gorgeous, digressive slab of a book" - charts the college life of Selin, a bookish naif at Harvard in the mid-1990s. The story borrows from Batuman's earlier work - heavy on Russophilia and kooky anecdotes - but offers a portrait of the intellectual and emotional development of an irresistible narrator. THE GAMES: A Global History of the Olympics, by David Goldblatt. (Norton, $17.95.) Goldblatt traces the glories and the stumbles of the modern Games, first held in Athens in 1896. Sexism, antiSemitism and racism have all plagued the Olympics for decades, as have scandals over worker conditions and concerns about doping. The book delves into the origins of beloved events like the marathon. SHADOWBAHN, by Steve Erickson. (Blue Rider, $16.) Twenty years after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the twin towers inexplicably crop up in the South Dakota badlands, inhabited by Elvis's stillborn twin brother. Our reviewer, Fiona Maazel, compared the novel to "a polyphonic dirge for an America that has perhaps never lived anywhere but in the imagination of those of us who keep fighting for it anyway." WHITE TEARS, by Hari Kunzru. (Vintage, $16.) Seth and Carter, two 20-something New Yorkers, are music-obsessed and imagine themselves as cutting-edge producers. The pair release a track - a recent recording from Washington Square - but pass it off as a relic from Charlie Shaw, a singer of their invention supposedly lost to history. When the hoax gets traction, it sets off a ghost story that touches on appropriation, race and the blues. The novel benefits from Kunzru's cleareyed and canny view of America's cultural shifts. AGAINST EMPATHY: The Case for Radical Compassion, by Paul Bloom. (Ecco/HarperCollins, $16.99.) Bloom, a Yale psychology professor, urges a reconsideration of the roles that emotions play in moral decisions; as he puts it, "I want to make a case for the value of conscious, deliberative reasoning in everyday life, arguing that we should strive to use our heads rather than our hearts." THEMEN IN MY LIFE: A Memoir of Love and Art in 1950s Manhattan, by Patricia Bosworth. (Harper/ HarperCollins, $17.99.) Bosworth is perhaps best known as a biographer of stars like Diane Arbus and Montgomery Clift; her autobiography follows her navigating a glamorous career and sexual coming-of-age. But she doesn't give short shrift to what she calls "the bereaved creature inside me," mourning her brother and father.

Batuman makes her fiction debut already a literary darling: a New Yorker staff writer since 2010 and the author of a much-adored essay collection, The Possessed, about the pleasurable intricacies of reading Russian literature. The year is 1995, and Turkish American 18-year-old Selin enters Harvard. She takes classes and makes friends, but her most important connection develops via email-new and enigmatic back then-with Ivan, an older student she rarely sees although she pines for his virtual missives. With freshman year over, she stops through France on her way to Hungary-because Ivan is there-where she'll be teaching English in a small village. Back at Harvard in the fall, she realizes, "I hadn't learned anything at all." In 2006, her "Short Story & Novel" contribution to highbrow literary journal n+1 included the line: "Write long novels, pointless novels." The Idiot is just that. As if to add further emphasis, Batuman plods through almost 14 hours of narration. With a novel so thoroughly hyped, listed, and award-predicted, perhaps disappointment is inevitable. VERDICT Despite Batuman's obvious erudition, crafting gorgeous phrases and being fluent in both philosophy and philology aren't enough to redeem this Idiot. ["Highly detailed and determinedly linear": LJ 12/16 review of the Penguin Pr. hc.]-Terry Hong, Smithsonian BookDragon, Washington, DC © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

*Starred Review* Batuman, winner of a Whiting Award and The Paris Review's Terry Southern Prize for Humor, lifted a title from Dostoevsky for her first book, the superb essay collection, The Possessed (2010). She does it again with her debut novel, a droll, semiautobiographical tale set in 1995 and narrated by a high-strung freshman at Harvard. A tall Turkish American from New Jersey, Selin is at once enthralled and frustrated by language, while finding mundane aspects of life indecipherable. She takes a mishmash of classes; struggles to tutor adults trying to earn their GED; becomes friends with Svetlana, a cosmopolitan Serb; and obsesses over Ivan, a Hungarian mathematics major. Selin feels dangerously overwhelmed, yet declares, I wanted to be unconventional and say meaningful things. Ivan is similarly disassociated from the norm, and the two conduct a hilariously cryptic courtship that culminates with Selin spending the summer teaching English in a Hungarian village and enduring a sequence of alarming excursions. Batuman's brainy, polymorphously curious innocent, her idiot, ponders profound questions about how culture and language shape feelings and experiences, how differently men and women are treated, and how baffling love is. Selin is entrancing so smart, so clueless, so funny and Batuman's exceptional discernment, comedic brilliance, and soulful inquisitiveness generate a charmingly incisive and resonant tale of the messy forging of a self.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2017 Booklist