Excerpt from Either/Or by Elif Batuman, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Had that been when I lost the thread of the story I was telling myself-the thread of the story about my life?

Svetlana's trip to Belgrade-her first time back since the war-had gone well, maybe thanks to all the preparation she had done with her shrink. There had been only one moment, at the store downstairs from her grandmother's apartment, when she had dropped a coin and bent over to pick it up, and suddenly remembered with horror how a milk bottle had once smashed on those particular floor tiles. She didn't remember what else had happened, or what had been so horrible. There was just the image of the glass splintering irretrievably in all directions, the blob of milk spreading over the dingy tiles like a diabolical hand.

"Spilled milk." Svetlana sighed. "Sometimes I wish my subconscious would be a little more original."

I wanted to hear more about it, but Svetlana was already thinking less about Belgrade than about the wilderness, where she had just come back from being a leader on a freshman pre-orientation program. I kept forgetting about the existence of the freshman pre-orientation programs. In addition to the outdoors one, there was an arts one, and a community-service one where you built houses for underprivileged people. You had to pay extra to do them-even the one where you built houses-so it had never occurred to me to apply. But Svetlana had done the outdoors one as a freshman, and had had a profound experience that was related to the sublime.

Listening to Svetlana talk, I fluctuated between believing that something really good had happened to her, and experiencing a profound sense of alienation. She described the intense relationships that she had formed with boring-sounding freshmen through trust exercises, games, and activities that had been devised, over the years, for just this purpose. She didn't seem disturbed, as I would have been, by the idea that it was an experience designed for you, to make you feel a certain way.

An increasingly important role was played in Svetlana's narration by her co-leader, Scott. Each group had two leaders, a guy and a girl. I understood that it must have been exciting to have a shared mission with a guy, requiring coordination and discussions and responsibility. At the same time, there was something sinister about everyone being really into this camping-themed mom-and-dad dress-up. Did I only feel that way because my parents were divorced?

Scott, who was into bluegrass and Zen, sounded like the kind of bland super-American dude who invariably found Svetlana hilarious. For some reason, guys like that always seemed negatively disposed toward me. When she got to the part about how Scott was a senior and had a girlfriend, Svetlana's tone implied that she was either steering away from, or ironically referring to, the comparison, immediately obvious to both of us, to Ivan. She kept emphasizing how specific her relationship to Scott was to the circumstances, because of how completely they had to trust each other, how they had to know each other's bodies, how they had to help each other to climb different natural and man-made obstacles, and to carry the things their bodies needed to survive out there, enveloped day and night in the fathomless beauty of nature.

"How am I ever going to give you up from my life?" Scott had asked Svetlana, on their last night together. Svetlana had told him that maybe it was for the best that their closeness was coming to an end there, since she was never so alive and intense as she was in the woods. "I told him, 'I can be pretty lackluster in the winter,'" she said, leaning characteristically into the unusual word choice, "'and I wouldn't want to disappoint you.'"

"You don't have to talk like that, about disappointing me," Scott had replied. "It's not like we're going out."

Why did I feel crushed? Svetlana was only quoting something Scott had said to her. It had nothing to do with me, and Svetlana herself didn't seem upset.

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