Sex for Art’s Sake

“One is tired of living in the country, one moves to the city; one is tired of one’s native land, one goes abroad; one is europamüde, one goes to America, and so on.” In Either/Or (1843), the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard calls this ceaseless quest for novelty the defining feature of an “aesthetic life,” one in which meaning is derived from pleasure-seeking (rather than from, say, the stable tedium of marriage). Those who subscribe to it are in constant pursuit of new erotic and artistic stimuli, consequences be damned: “One burns half of Rome to get an idea of the conflagration of Troy.” Fortunately, for the Harvard student Selin Karadağ—the protagonist of Elif Batuman’s The Idiot (her fiction debut, and a Pulitzer Prize nominee in 2018) and its sequel, Either/Or—embracing this quest never comes to arson. A sophomore now, in Batuman’s second novel, she can just declare a new major.

For Selin, a narrator who treats course descriptions as manifestos, this portends a drastic shift in worldview and sensibility. At the end of , she resolved to stop taking classes in the psychology and philosophy of language. She had just spent the summer of 1996 teaching English in a village outside Budapest, a job she took