Growing Down in 'Either/Or'

Elif Batuman’s new novel Either/Or forms, with her earlier The Idiot, a brilliant and deft epic of intellectual and artistic tragedy, a sort of anti-Kunstlerroman in which a young woman in her first two years as a Harvard undergraduate systematically forgoes her subtle insights and feral good taste for the well-trod, dulling collegiate pastures of sex, drugs, and politics.