Claire Messud’s new novel, “The Woman Upstairs,” is narrated by Nora, a schoolteacher who is outwardly tidy, quiet, and pleasing, and inwardly enraged at her constant capitulation to the desires of others and her own stalled artistic impulses. Her voice is edgy, assured, and marked by bursts of rage: “It was supposed to say ‘Great Artist’ on my tombstone,” she tells us, “but if I died right now it would say ‘such a good teacher/daughter/friend’ instead; and what I really want to shout, and want in big letters on that grave, too, is FUCK YOU ALL. Don’t all women feel the same?” The book has been widely praised for its portrayal of an unbounded inner life, and yet it has also prompted discussion about many readers’ resistance to unlikeable characters—particularly unlikeable female characters. When Messud was recently asked by PW if she would like to be friends with Nora (the interviewer said, emphatically, that she would not), she responded sharply:> For heaven’s sake, what kind of question is that? Would you want to be friends with Humbert Humbert? Would you want to be friends with Mickey Sabbath? Saleem Sinai? Hamlet? Krapp? Oedipus? Oscar Wao? Antigone? Raskolnikov? Any of the characters in The Corrections? Any of the characters in Infinite Jest? Any of the characters in anything Pynchon has ever written? Or Martin Amis? Or Orhan Pamuk? Or Alice Munro, for that matter? If you’re reading to find friends, you’re in deep trouble. We read to find life, in all its possibilities. The relevant question isn’t “is this a potential friend for me?” but “is this character alive?”
This critical double standard—that tormented, foul-mouthed, or perverse male characters are celebrated, while their female counterparts are primly dismissed as unlikeable—has been pointed out many times before. But Messud’s comments seemed an occasion to examine the question again. We surveyed a group of novelists—Donald Antrim, Margaret Atwood, Jonathan Franzen, Rivka Galchen, and Tessa Hadley—asking them how often the question of likeability has been posed about their characters, if they anticipate this response as they’re writing (and also whether they think this is a question that women writers are confronted with more than men), and why this persists as a criteria for so many readers. Here are their responses.
It’s a large question, and relates to persona, narcissism, and the writer’s appeal to the reader through fictional proxies. I can think of plenty of likeable characters, even some who are murderers. When we accept the suspension of disbelief, we agree to a logic—the story’s premise and its extension as, and eventually into, a created world; and we need empathy to make our experience in the reading. But empathy is not appreciation, infatuation, or the feeling that an author and her characters are decent people. Does trust in the integrity of a fictional realm require assurance of the benevolence or compassion or attractiveness of the guide? Do we read in order to “identify” with characters, and, if and when we do, are we also in the business of identifying their author as someone we’d like to be friends with? Does reading goodness or decency ratify our own, and what if it doesn’t? An author’s concern over a character’s likeability might also be a concern over the author herself—over the Self, in other words; over social approval, moral authority, the potential for larger literary popularity, and so on—and may be atavistic and an occasion for politics and preening. At any rate, reading into persona is a waste of time and life; our empathy will not be engaged but our narcissism might, and our experience will likely come without deeper emotional and spiritual recognitions and awakenings. The author maneuvering for love is commonplace and ordinary, and the work of fiction that seductively asserts the brilliance or importance or easy affability of its creator is an insubstantial thing. I have no problem with liking a character. But if that’s the reason I’m reading, I’ll put the book down.
—Donald Antrim
This does still come up. It is indeed a ridiculous question. The qualities we appreciate in a character are not the same as those we would look for in a college roommate. I have written extensively about this in the past—see “Spotty-Handed Villainesses” (1993), which is to be found in “Writing With Intent,” page 125. You can get it instantly as an e-book. One quote: “Create a flawless character and you create an insufferable one.”
I myself have been idiotically told that I write “awful” books because the people in them are unpleasant. Intelligent readers do not confuse the quality of a book with the moral rectitude of the characters. For those who want goodigoodiness, there are some Victorian good-girl religious novels that would suit them fine.
Also, what is “likeable”? We love to watch bad people do awful things in fictions, though we would not like it if they did those things to us in real life. The energy that drives any fictional plot comes from the darker forces, whether they be external (opponents of the heroine or hero) or internal (components of their selves).
Do women writers get asked this more than male ones? Bet your buttons they do. The snaps and snails and puppy-dog’s tails are great for boys. The sugar and spice is still expected for girls. Up to a point.
I stand firmly with Claire Messud.
—Margaret Atwood
My guess is that Claire Messud isn’t just responding to that one question. Probably that question simply precipitated a reaction to experiences accumulated over fifteen-plus years as a novelist and critic. After all, that question, which simply registers finding her character “unlikable,” gets asked all the time, of female and male authors both, and in regards to female and male characters both, and there is critical room to consider Humbert Humbert’s likability/unlikability, which is, of course, something that was manipulated by Nabokov, just as the reader’s reception of Nora in “The Woman Upstairs” is manipulated by Messud. Writers are constantly conscious of the emotions they are eliciting in a reader. A fair enough thing to take a critical interest in, therefore.
But then there’s the whole tangle of a book’s popular reception, which includes mass media and its reporters: Is a character’s “likability” being conflated with the artistic success of a work? And, if so, who is doing all this conflating? And is he/she/they/zeitgeist more often sloppy in this way with regard to female characters? To characters written by female authors? And is it just generally easier to find “lovable” an angry (or ne’er-do-well, or half-mad, or blunted, or asocial, or immature, or otherwise “limited”) male protagonist than a female one? I would suggest that we are well-trained to like “unappealing” male characters—so much so that I would imagine anyone who wanted their male character to be truly and deeply unlikeable would face quite a challenge. Even Céline, poor thing, whose appalling protagonists I still feel compelled to find charming. Conversely, we are not well-trained to like anyone other than the basically virtuous and proficient female protagonist. Au contraire.
And yet, of course, one wants to be careful, and not argue from anecdote and hunches, and one doesn’t have the full Franco Moretti numbers or analysis, and maybe also one doesn’t want to get into the sociological fray of it at all and would rather just read and write; but then, it’s more than extremely annoying that so many people pretend there’s just no such thing as a difference between how male and female characters (and authors) are “read,” simply because they can think of exception X or Y, even as, when you do think of it, it’s pretty obvious that there’s a massive over-all q-or-p landscape in which X and Y are like two rare, little kingfishers that made it to the island way back on a 1910 boating trip… All that said, I do feel moved to share an anecdote that I stand by as one solid, lonely data point—my own experience.
In my twenties, I became guiltily conscious that my personal favorite literary protagonists (Italo Svevo’s Zeno, Knut Hamsun’s narrator in “Hunger,” Halldór Laxness’s Bjartur, Kleist’s Michael Kohlhaas, Cervantes’s Don Quixote) were all male, all written by males, and all pains in the ass. When I tried to read beyond the books that had already made their way to me, in order to find other books that might have female narrators or characters that were likewise difficult and entrancing… well, it wasn’t straightforward, but I got there: in the narrators of Lydia Davis’s work, in the characters of Flannery O’Connor, in the novels of Muriel Spark, in the “Pillow Book” of Sei Shonagon, and in one of Helen DeWitt’s central characters in “The Last Samurai.” I have since located others, but I still don’t really understand why it is so problematic to find and write such characters. I have various hypotheses, which I am not confident about. I think Claire Messud was talking about something substantive and more mysterious than it might first seem; and the kerfuffle on the Internet obscures the fact that “The Woman Upstairs” has, as a central project, an investigation into this dim territory.
—Rivka Galchen
I hate the concept of likeability—it gave us two terms of George Bush, whom a plurality of voters wanted to have a beer with, and Facebook. You’d unfriend a lot of people if you knew them as intimately and unsparingly as a good novel would. But not the ones you actually love.
—Jonathan Franzen
If ever I go to talk to book groups when they’re reading my book, this likeability issue is always what comes up—“Oh, I didn’t like her”, “she’s so selfish,” or “I couldn’t find anyone to like.” Or—more comforting for the author but, in the end, part of the same problem—“I really liked your character.”
I suppose a writer shouldn’t mind really. At the deepest level, when we cross the threshold of a realist, or more-or-less realist, novel, we do submit to an illusion that we’re passing into a real world, with real people in it. That’s part of the joy and mystery of reading, it’s not naïvety. And we may well react to those people just as we do in real life, loving them or hating them and everything in between. This goes on working, this being moved by the fictional characters someone invents out of words, however sophisticated we are as readers. I wouldn’t want to stop reading like that, being moved by these character-phantoms just as if I knew them in the flesh. More deeply than if I knew them in the flesh, perhaps.
What’s disappointing isn’t the reader having that reaction, as if the book were real life. Rather, it’s the timidity of readers’ judgements sometimes—their wanting characters to be “nice,” their punitive reaction if the character is headlong, or extravagant, or selfish—particularly if it’s a female character, and a female reader. (Male readers seem less interested—is this a gross generalization?—in characters being “nice.”) I think people are less judgmental in real life than they are when it comes to fiction—isn’t that funny? But it’s so obvious to a writer that they need the grit of bad behavior, or recklessness, or sheer cruelty, or suffering in order to write something true and vivid. No one would want dreary novels full of people behaving considerately, would they? We wouldn’t recognize ourselves.
I’ve hated characters in the books I’ve read sometimes, and problematically, so that it spoiled the book. I couldn’t live with Mickey Sabbath on my bedside table. He roused a violent antipathy in me, even though I knew that was precisely what he was meant to do, rouse antipathy in someone like me, and I tried with all my might to resist feeling it. But I failed. So I know that this “likeability” thing isn’t altogether under readers’ control. I find Mrs. Dalloway a pain, too.
—Tessa Hadley
Illustration by Roman Muradov
