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Here, fiction’s only mandate is to exploit the particular freedom afforded by the form - to coast on the charm and peculiar sensibility of our narrator, Selin, “an American teenager, the world’s least interesting and dignified kind of person.” It is a rejoinder to the pressure on literature to serve as self-help, to make us empathetic or better informed, to be useful. lopes along like a highbrow episode of “Louie,” a series of silly, surreal, confident riffs about humiliations, minor and major.

“The Idiot,” a hefty, gorgeous, digressive slab of a book.

The idiot novel elif