"With the abrupt sadness of The Idiot's final sentence, I felt a near-physical wrench, as if forcibly separated from someone who had swiftly become a good friend. I probably read the second half of the book too quickly �� I loved it so much, and wish I'd taken more time to savour it �� but once I'd started, I just couldn't stop.

The eponymous idiot is 18-year-old Harvard freshman Selin (though with all the Russian influences popping up throughout the story, the title is clearly intended to evoke Dostoyevsky's masterpiece. Especially as both centre on a figure of extreme naivety, unprepared for 'real' life). It goes without saying that Selin is far from idiotic, but any high school overachiever will recognise the disorientation of being plunged into a university environment and finding your remarkable talents are no longer remarkable, your outstanding intellect is just the norm, and whatever previously made you special now seems childish and insignificant. Of Turkish descent, Selin is surrounded by a truly multicultural, multilingual and multitalented cast of supporting characters, all of whom (she thinks) are better equipped to handle the strange vagaries of adult life and relationships than she is. Repeatedly, Selin experiences a revelation I remember well from that time of my life, and still sometimes get a sense of even now: it seems everyone else has, at some point, mysteriously learned codes of behaviour that remain obscure to her, and which she's unable to internalise just by observing.

Selin never really knows what she's doing. Many of her decisions, such as the choice to start learning Russian, and later to teach ESL, are made almost randomly, when she has little idea which path to take. (She does know, instinctively, that she is a writer, but feels doomed, rather than destined, to this fate. She carries the weight of personal note-taking and emailing as though it's a compulsory task, and dissects her thoughts and others' words like they're homework. When a short story of hers wins a prize, she's dismayed: 'I didn’t want anyone to think I thought it was good'.) Central to Selin's development throughout the book is her close, tense, peculiar friendship with Ivan, a slightly older student she meets at the aforementioned Russian class. She becomes infatuated: her decision to spend the summer teaching English in Hungary, his home country, is a result of that.

I spent the entire book hoping Selin and Ivan wouldn't get together, hoping Batuman would resist the allure of making good on the will-they-won't-they tension that pervades their interaction. And then I came to the end and found that all along, I had wanted them to be together after all. Their relationship �� well, Selin's side of their relationship �� reminded me of a quote, attributed to Kurt Cobain, I'm always seeing superimposed across photographs on sites like Pinterest and Tumblr: thank you for the tragedy; I need it for my art. The sense that at this age, a part of you craves the suffering and drama of rejection, because it fits who you feel you are, and because it's easier. If you're an introverted, arty teenager, an outsider, a virgin, then moping and yearning (and writing about it) are what you know; you wouldn't have a clue what to do with reciprocation. Incidentally, with Ivan, Batuman expertly captures the speech patterns of someone who speaks excellent English as a second language; he really does have a palpable voice.

THIS is a real coming-of-age story, not all the pulpy crap that gets churned out about 14-year-olds having orgies in the woods or whatever. Selin is so precisely an 18/19-year-old freshman: the perfect mix of naive and sarcastic, rebel and conformist, book-smart and ignorant. I loved her. (There's also something beautiful, and so refreshing, about love remaining unrequited in a narrative like this.) I'd love to quote lots from this book �� I feel Selin's words would communicate the charm of the novel far better than I can by talking about it �� but of course I can't, for now, because I read an advance copy.

Another really important thing about The Idiot that the above probably doesn't communicate at all: I found it hilarious. I honestly choked with laughter at some pages; a couple of times, I became so hysterical that I had to stop reading for a while to calm down. Selin has that dry, witty type of humour that makes the most banal asides into laugh-out-loud lines, and just the way she describes basically anything, the view from a window, the way people look, their voices... oh, man. I can't even explain it. You definitely have to read it.

For me, The Idiot was a perfect cocktail: a protagonist in whom I saw myself reflected at every turn of the plot; a particular sense of humour; subtle subversion of tropes I get sick of encountering in fiction. I want to read it again. I need to read it again. I will buy a physical copy when it's published. I will buy copies as gifts for other people, too. It's the sort of book I want to recommend, not by shouting about it to anyone who'll listen, but by seeking out those I know will appreciate it and ardently pressing it upon them.

(Supplemental: Christian Lorentzen's fantastic at Vulture. Her description of rereading stuff you wrote when you were much younger is bang-on. 'When I was younger, the content was embarrassing to me, so I devised a style that was supposed to mitigate it. As an adult, the thing I found most embarrassing was the very style that I thought would mitigate the embarrassing content.')

I received an advance review copy of The Idiot from the publisher, Penguin Random House.

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