Having given her first book the same title as Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Possessed, Elif Batuman has kept that streak going with her follow-up, but any comparison between the two would be apples and oranges.

In The Idiot, Batuman tells the story of a unique but hardly extraordinary Turkish-American Harvard freshman, and not the tumultuous life of someone like Dostoevsky’s 1868 protagonist, Prince Lev Nikolaevich Myshkin.