RaveChicago ReviewSubversive. In refusing to structure The Idiot around romantic conflict, climax, and resolution, Batuman suggests that a woman’s story is worth telling even if it is not principally defined by her interactions with men ... Selin reads too much literature for her own good—but the problem is explicitly that this literature is by and for men, that it reflects a world in which men are dominant. Either/Or attempts to work within the tradition of the novel of education, but also to interrogate it ... Either/Or attempts to find the sweet spot between nineteenth-century fiction and twentieth-century theory: as a novel that exposes the limits of the novel’s implicitly male, rational subject, it is both feminist and pleasurable to read.
