If universities didn't exist, authors would be forced to invent them. How else to guarantee an unending supply of targets for satirical humor? Rising majestically above the fray, the ivy-draped towers of academe seem to sneer at the trivial pursuits of the tiny lives below - at dull, hamster-wheel activities such as earning a paycheck and fighting traffic and making mortgage payments. Such imperial disdain is, in turn, easily mocked.
In two new books by two extremely smart women, however, we realize that the people in the towers are very much in on the joke. They understand that their preoccupations can seem, to those on the ground below, ridiculously lofty and pointlessly esoteric, that in times of great economic distress - i.e., now - the notion of people in tweed jackets sitting around debating the existence of God or the metaphors of Tolstoy can be irksome. Still, such debate occurs. And we're richer for it.
Elif Batuman and Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, authors of "The Possessed: Adventures With Russian Books and the People Who Read Them" (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) and "36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction" (Pantheon), prove that you can be both smart and funny.
Batuman's book is officially a collection of linked essays, but it's really a love story.
Not a girl-meets-boy (or girl-meets-girl or boy-meets-boy) love story, but the even richer and possibly more enduring girl-meets-classic-literature kind of love story. Batuman, a Stanford University graduate student during the events described in the book, always assumed she'd write a novel. She tried. Didn't happen. "I began to wonder," Batuman relates in the preface, "about other possible methods for bringing one's life closer to one's favorite books." Sounds like love to me.
Off she goes, then, on a series of gloriously misbegotten adventures in search of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Babel, Chekhov, Pushkin, Turgenev - the great Russian authors who float, always brooding and sometimes bearded, above the literary canon like stern, obscurely disapproving uncles. Batuman's style is light, brisk, casual, but always learned. She goes to Moscow to root out the real cause of Tolstoy's death. She attends an academic conference at Stanford focusing on Babel that comes across like a Marx Brothers movie. She spends a summer in Uzbekistan trying to perfect her Uzbek.
At every stop along the way, Batuman's observations are wonderfully vivid: "Her voice," she writes of her Uzbek teacher, "was soft and regretful, as if she were gently breaking you some terrible news."
Along a street in Samarkand, she notes the poultry: "A few times I saw a chicken walking around important, like some kind of regional manager."
You may emerge from reading "The Possessed" with enormous respect for those who lives the life of the mind while wandering amid the chickens.
On the opposite side of the country from Batuman's Stanford is Harvard, one of the settings for Goldstein's sixth novel. "36 Arguments for the Existence of God" is about four academics and one little boy. The boy is so smart that to a member of the quartet, the lad "will always stand at the place where our universe touches the extraordinary."
Seltzer had recently gained fame as the "atheist with a soul," owing to a book on religious doubt that caught the public's fancy. Yet his partner, mathematical theoretician Lucinda Mandelbaum, doesn't share his interest in explicating religious faith. Once Seltzer's old flame, an anthropologist determined to thwart human aging, shows up, the novel gets going, complete with scenes of academics airing out their tender egos. The narrative occasionally is bogged down in lengthy exchanges over religious history, but the payoff is sublime.
In the final paragraph, Seltzer decides that it may very well be true "that no solution exists, that the most gifted among us is feeble in mind against the brutality of incomprehension that assaults us from all sides. And so we try, as best we can, to do justice to the tremendousness of our improbable existence."
Turns out that those folks up in the tower are doing just what the rest of us are doing: muddling along, and sometimes looking at the sky in awe and wonder.
