life-changingly good. one of the few novels that will sell you absurdity/comedy and actually deliver, simply by virtue of the 18-year-old narrator (arlife-changingly good. one of the few novels that will sell you absurdity/comedy and actually deliver, simply by virtue of the 18-year-old narrator (arguably the most embarrassing age to document, and elif nails that sense of abject, emotionally un-self-aware humiliation). in spite of the novel's set-up—super standard, high school-to-college transition, a kind of coming-of-age 'initiation' novel—this is highly sophisticated and rich with detail. it's one of those books training me out of my "autofiction is lazy/easy/low-hanging fruit" bias, because so much of it is modeled after elif batuman's early life.
the idiot defies its own form when and where possible, by presenting itself in bite size diary entry-like fashion. i hesitate to compare the vignettes to tumblr posts, because that seems to suggest inherent cringe, but i felt that aesthetic connection, at least in retrospect. email might be a more apt comparison, considering the epistolary dimensions of the novel and the time period in which it's set.
yes, the love interest in this was annoying as FUCK and i wanted to bash my head against a wall any time he took up extended space on the page. i found him pretentious, self-serving, pushy, presumptuous, and extremely boring, especially when set beside svetlana. BUT, that kind of love interest is emblematic of being 18 and discovering desire—you develop feelings in the strangest of places. you're only just figuring out who you are, which means your earliest crushes are often less about the love interest in question and more about meeting a new (read: desirable or mysterious or interesting) version of yourself through that love interest. self-referential processing is a hell of a drug.
having read batuman's , i really see what she means when she calls the short story a dead form:
Today’s short stories all seem to bear an invisible check mark, the ghastly imprimatur of the fiction factory; the very sentences are animated by some kind of vegetable consciousness: “I worked for Kristin,� they seem to say, or “Jeff thought I was fucking hilarious.� Meanwhile, the ghosts of deleted paragraphs rattle their chains from the margins.
if we take the novel to be the aesthetic (or political) antithesis of the short story, we know one thing: the novel, more often than not, justifies its own existence. short stories must by nature be tight, lean, and intimately aware of the treatment of time, perspective, and chronology. the acreage of a novel makes a case for itself: yes, i am long-winded and self-interested and meandering and full of stops, starts, detours, congestion and car wrecks, but think of the length of the journey, the effort it took us to get here, the feat of a finished ending! you have so much more space to throw objects and images and people at readers, to force their investment in a kind of tense gun-to-the-temple dynamic. the novel is a forgiving medium because it’s a long and swanning one.
this was that—full of historical detritus, homework assignments, language conundrums, travel anecdotes, friendships both fleeting and anchored, and it all added up to something dazzlingly human. a novel i believed in from start to finish. a novel that made me believe in novels, that made me want to rethink the novel as a genre, that made me want to sit up and start writing.
this will probably (maybe) be a 5 star reread, but for now 4.5/5. ...more
coming off of a trend of disaffected female narrators who seek out painful/unhealthy sex as a reprieve in novels where practically nothing happens, i coming off of a trend of disaffected female narrators who seek out painful/unhealthy sex as a reprieve in novels where practically nothing happens, i thought this novel this was A BREATHHHHH OF FRESH AIR ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️
it took me until about the 40% mark to really buy into the execution of happy hour, but once i was sucked into the episodic diary entry style of parties and passersby and endless opinions from the main character isa, i flew through this. if you're into slice-of-life literature where nothing much happens, i think this is a lovely little break from the current emotional trend (dislocation/dissociation/disaffection and/or dread to a numbing, blunted degree) in contemporary literary fiction.
there's quite a bit of emotional avoidance in this, but the narrative is no less buoyant for it, and it is a landscape rich with opinions (on everything and everyone, a fact which i came to adore) and hilarious little "life lessons" from two girls probably far too young to know so much. i love the presumptuous quality of the narration, i love how stuck-up and boy-obsessed isa and gala are and how this plays off of their own sociopolitical positionalities, and i particuarly love that this is a novel populated by way too many throwaway characters.
there's something to be said for narratives that employ too many secondary characters, not as one-dimensional devices, but as simple atmospheric or tonal shifts that are not tied causally to any major plot threads in the book. people come and go in happy hour, and believably so, and while the basic 3-act conflict structure is present skeletally, the "plot" (if you can argue that there is one) doesn't feel artificial or contrived the way that so much commercial literature does these days. there are probably too many men in this and too few women, but the characters are audibly self-absorbed and hedonistic and obsessed with flaunting their own class status in a way that's more often than not incredibly comedic. in a setting like new york, which is both crowded and compressed, this works wonderfully.
it's obvious that a lot (if not all) of this is autobiographical in some way, as marlowe granados comes from a nonfiction background, lives in new york city, and shares quite a lot in common with her characters and world (including the names of some major characters), but this wasn't really a mark against the book for me. i found the journalistic prose style—shrewd, observatory without becoming obsessed with itself or voice/style so much as memories and moments in time—to be refreshing and easy to access. the dialogue is at times melodramatic or cheesy, but i didn't mind too much, because that melodrama and cheesiness fits so well with the set dressings.
i will even forgive granados the corny, totally cliché last line of this book, because it was such a romp. i so admire novels that can pull off no plot convincingly and still leave a lasting impression. i think that ultimately sways me here. happy hour and its too-young party girl bent really sell the "every day is the same day except that we find new standalone adventures each time," without falling victim to the darkly, dangerously sex obsessed undercurrent that's in vogue in litfic right now.
a book i need to own a physical copy of, to write in and reread endlessly....more
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