Batuman recalls that when she herself was in college, she read Anna Karenina as suggesting “it was part of the rich, ineluctable fabric of the human condition for women to ruin their lives over unsatisfactory men.” Similarly, in Either/Or, Selin has internalized that to be the novelist she wants to be, she must experience “that other kind of love”-not the innocent, unrequited crushes of her adolescence, but the kind of love “where ‘something happened’” (166).

Nineteenth-century novels, especially, teach us that sex and love are the proper “subjects of great art,” and that they must entail female suffering. While this case of overblown expectations might be harmless enough, Either/Or is ultimately a novel of education concerned with the damage that novels of education do. Selin has seen enough movies to know that sex ends with that which is often “symbolized…by geysers or fountains or a lawn irrigation system.” But when it finally happens, Selin finds it bathetic, ludicrous, almost cute: a “helpless little spurt, like a new spring plant” (223). We come into our first sexual encounters primed with representations of sex, which can make for an almost ludicrous contrast between what we thought we knew and what we discover in the act. But as Selin reminds us, sex also marks an epistemological boundary, one much more flexible than simply either/or. It is also revealing of one of the book’s central preoccupations: what is the relationship between the classroom and the bedroom, between education and experience?Ĭan education and experience even be distinguished from one another? We tend to think of sex as an embodied experience and a physiological threshold-one is either a virgin or not. The scene is more than an occasion for a joke about semantics. Where the term ‘hand job’ sounded generic, mechanical, and tough, the act itself felt specific, organic, tender, and sort of gross” (222).

Language has failed to prepare her for experience: “Here was another thing I had heard about: the gap between the signifier and the signified. Because part of her brain “is always generating a commentary,” she reflects on the discrepancy between her expectations about sex and its raw, strange physicality (223). In February of her sophomore year at Harvard, Selin, the narrator of Elif Batuman’s Either/Or, meets a boy at a party who invites her back to his room.

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