by
Elif Batuman
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When Vivie apologized for eating slowly, Béla said that eating slowly was good: “If you eat slowly, you can feel the food.”
“You don’t feel food,” Owen said, “you taste it.”
“Yes,” Béla said. “But I also mean more than to taste it.”
“You enjoy it,” suggested Daniel. “If you eat slowly, you enjoy the food.”
“You enjoy,” repeated Béla.
“You relish it,” said Owen. “You savor it.”
“Savior?”
“Not savior—savor. It’s like enjoying something, but more slowly.”
“I don’t know this word,” Béla said, his eyes shining.
I realized that I would never have corrected somebody who said “you can feel the food.” That was how Owen would end up with students who said “savor,” while I would end up with students who said “papel iss blonk.”
“Yes, of course!” I noticed then that she was wearing a tiny backpack with both straps on. I suppressed a sigh. Hungary felt increasingly like reading War and Peace: new characters came up every five minutes, with their unusual names and distinctive locutions, and you had to pay attention to them for a time, even though you might never see them again for the whole rest of the book. I would rather have talked to Ivan, the love interest, but somehow I didn’t get to decide. At the same time, I also felt that these superabundant personages weren’t irrelevant at all, but somehow the opposite, and that when Ivan had told me to make friends with the other kids, he had been telling me something important about the world, about how the fateful character in your life wasn’t the one who buried you in a rock, but the one who led you out to more people.
"A HAT, A HAT, A BEAUTIFUL HAT,” she said, pulling me to the stands that sold baskets and other straw goods.
I felt some irrational primal resistance toward letting her buy me a hat, even though it was clear, or should have been clear, that this was the only way we would ever be able to move on with our lives. She picked up a wide-brimmed child’s hat with a ribbon, set it on my head, and started yanking down on the brim, trying to make it fit. “Hat,” she murmured under her breath in Hungarian.
Panic mounted in my body. “I DON’T NEED A HAT!” I shouted in Russian. Everyone turned to look at me. “You know what I like very much, is this,” I said, picking up a tiny misshapen basket.
“I didn’t know you liked baskets,” she said, a bit accusingly. She bought me the basket, and then a little stuffed basset hound that fit inside. The basset hound wore a tragic expression; a plastic heart glued to its front legs read I LOVE YOU in white script.
Left alone, I washed up, changed into the Dr. Seuss shirt, got in bed, and started writing in my notebook. I kept thinking about the uneven quality of time—the way it was almost always so empty, and then with no warning came a few days that felt so dense and alive and real that it seemed indisputable that that was what life was, that its real nature had finally been revealed. But then time passed and unthinkably grew dead again, and it turned out that that fullness had been an aberration and might never come back. I wanted to write about it while I could still feel it and see it around me, while the teacups still seemed to be trembling. Suddenly it occurred to me that maybe the point of writing wasn’t just to record something past but also to prolong the present, like in One Thousand and One Nights, to stretch out the time until the next thing happened and, just as I had that thought, I saw a dark shape behind the frosted glass and heard a knock on the door.
I dreamed I was sitting in a tiled bathhouse. Late afternoon light poured through a high window, and water was seeping under the door, slowly filling the room, mounting higher and higher. Then the door opened and a wall of water gushed in, and through the same door my brother also came, but it wasn’t my real-life brother, it was Ivan, and I stood up and we embraced. The water was up to our knees. We held on to each other really, really tightly.
“I love you so much,” I said.
“I know—so do I,” he said.
I woke up with tears in my eyes. Sunlight streamed through the window, sparkling off the gilded teacups. I found a disposable camera in a side pocket of my backpack, and snapped a photograph of the teacups, with one handle facing left. At least I would know I hadn’t dreamed the thing about the teacups.
“Do you think it’s going to rain?” I asked.
“Yes. Why?”
My heart quickened. “I don’t know,” I said. Then I realized I wanted it to rain because maybe Ivan and his family would come back to Budapest a day early and Ivan might call me. I knew there were a lot of flaws in this reasoning. But my body didn’t know.
A whole ocean of rain seemed to be pouring out of the sky. We sat under an awning near a hotel parking lot and ate yellow plums. Eventually Rózsa ate one of the cookies I had bought, and I felt happy and proud, like I had successfully fed a shy and proud animal.
Within minutes the sun was blazing as if it didn’t remember a thing.
Juli’s mother, a beautician, was very thin, with unusually bright eyes. For dinner she made a soup called “boy-catching soup” and a cake called “mother-in-law cake.” These two dishes seemed to sum up a whole worldview of entrapment and placation.
The rim of the bathtub and the top of the mirrored cabinet were crowded with products for dry or damaged hair. I saw a deep recovery healing shampoo for deep damage repair, a dry remedy moisturizing mask for damaged curly hair, a total repair conditioner for hair damaged and dried by styling products, an ultimate moisture conditioner for very stressed hair, and a bottle that just read EMERGENCY TREATMENT: HAIR DAMAGED BY DRYNESS. I stood under the shower, luxuriating in the hot water yet troubled by a mounting sense of unease about my relatives’ hair.
[...] What was missing from the older literary forms, in other words, wasn’t social justice, but the passage of time—a dimension the novel was specifically engineered to capture. The novelistic hero is by definition someone whose life experience hasn’t yet been fully described, possibly because of his race or class, but more broadly because he didn’t exist before, and neither did the technology for describing him. The durability and magic of the novel form lies in the fact that, having gained a certain level of currency, the latest novel is immediately absorbed into the field of preexisting literature, and becomes the thing the next novel has to be written against. In this dialectic, the categories of outsider and insider are in constant flux. For an outsider to become an insider isn’t ironic or paradoxical: it’s just the way things work.
Ironically, a preoccupation with historic catastrophe actually ends up depriving the novel of the kind of historical consciousness it was best suited to capture. The effect is particularly clear in the “maximalist” school of recent fiction, which strives, as McGurl puts it, to link “the individual experience of authors and characters to the kinds of things one finds in history textbooks”: “war, slavery, the social displacements of immigration, or any other large-scale trauma”; historical traumas, McGurl explains, confer on the novel “an aura of ‘seriousness’ even when, as in Pynchon or Vonnegut, the work is comic. Personal experience so framed is not merely personal experience,” a fact that “no amount of postmodern skepticism … is allowed to undermine.” The implication is that “personal experience” is insufficient grounds for a novel, unless it is entangled in a “large-scale trauma”—or, worse yet, that an uncompelling (or absent) story line can be redeemed by a setting full of disasters.
This is the kind of literary practice James Wood so persuasively condemned under the rubric of “hysterical realism” (“Toby’s mad left-wing aunt was curiously struck dumb when Mrs. Thatcher was elected prime minister”). Diachronicity is cheaply telegraphed by synchronic cues, and history is replaced by big-name historical events, often glimpsed from some “eccentric” perspective: a slideshow-like process, as mechanical as inserting Forrest Gump beside Kennedy at the White House. As Wood points out, the maximalist fetishization of history is actually antihistoric: the maximalist novel “carries within itself, in its calm profusion of characters and plots, its flawless carpet of fine prose on page after page, a soothing sense that it might never have to end, that another thousand or two thousand pages might easily be added.”