Claire Messud And Character Likability

1. I am not sure I buy this, mostly because it's the sort of claim that can't be tested.

2. "Likability" is sort of a placeholder, no? Depending on our tastes, "likable" might mean "complex" or it might mean "easy going and friendly" or it might mean "crazy and impulsive." I would totally agree that MCs don't need to be easy going and friendly. I would argue that they probably ought to be likable for some reason or other.

100% agree. I couldn't care less if I'd hang out with a character, I want them to be interesting and compelling, even if that means they're a total ass. Of course nice characters can be interesting as well, but that isn't an important quality that they have to have for me to like them. The most recent example I can think of is Rumplestiltskin from Once Upon a Time. He's the only character in that whole show that I like, and he's the farthest thing from nice. But I find him the most interesting.

Agree with the first point too. Though I think this extends past female authors and to female characters. I've had quite a few friends think more harshly of a character when they're a girl, even if a guy character were to do the same thing. Or let a guy character pass on things they would call a girl character out on. I don't really know why that is, but it's something I've noticed.

Are female writings really scrutinized more about character likeability? I've heard the claim that female characters are but not authors. Not that I would know. I'm just curious.

Hmmm, now that I think about this, I think I have mostly created characters I'd hang out with, except one, and she exists kind of as a foil. But overall, most of my characters are people I'd like. Makes me think maybe I should start a project with an unlikeable character just to get a feel for it.

I just finished reading In One Person by John Irving, and the main character is very sympathetic but not what I'd call likeable, only because he takes a while to come out of his shell (I thought). It actually kept me from progressing in the novel for a while. Even after finishing, I don't know that I'd seek out this person's company just because he wasn't my friend "type," but he was definitely an interesting character.

Toothpaste said:

It seems female authors are more scrutinized over the likability of their characters than male authors.

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I've never noticed this, and you need to provide some documentation for this otherwise unsupported assertion.

Toothpaste said:

Which leads me to the question...why?

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Me too. Why did you posit such a thing?

caw

"Friends?" Really? I'm actually just glaring at my screen right now so annoyed that I can't even really express just how annoyed I am by how inappropriate and ridiculous a criteria this is in evaluating a main character of a book.

As for the 'likeability' thing, I thing we first need to define what we mean by that. For example, I love the hell out of Patrick Bateman but he sure isn't a person I'd like to be friends with in real life.

'Likeable' to me, is a character I enjoy reading about regardless whether they are horrible evil monsters or sweetest dearest angels.

Characters that are 'unlikable' to me are ones who are too-stupid-to-function, too annoying or too boring.

Here's another example of an awful person who happens to be a very likeable character, Blair Waldorf from the Gossip Girl books. She's a vain, mean, vicious little drama queen, but she is so much fun that the readers love her anyway! Would I want to be her friend in real life? NO WAY? Do I like reading about her? Yep!

It makes me wonder what "likability" means. Usually I'm imagining being a character, not hanging out with the character. I don't want characters to be my friends, I want me to be them, at least imagine being them for a time. So whatever differences we have, I have to be comfortable imagining swapping some of my deep-seated philosophical moral beliefs for the sake of some I may not agree with, especially when characters are making more sinister choices.

So why am I comfortable going along with, say, the murderous villain Sweeney Todd, but not, say, Kvothe of The Name of the Wind? Kvothe is far nobler than sleazy Todd, I certainly don't hold Todd's morality in higher regard, yet Kvothe annoys me far more. I'm not sure why. Perhaps it has something to do with how well we can relate to a character's reasoning, even when we don't agree with it; how well we can understand where his or her goals are coming from. Eh, I have no idea... something to ponder.

There are characters we love and characters we love to hate. We'll read about both.

I've heard talk of every character needing some sort of redeeming quality, but this isn't about likability. It's about making them come off as three dimensional. No one is all bad or all good.

I wouldn't hang out with any character in my current WIP, not because they aren't nice people, but we have such different lifestyles that it would never come up. That said, I hang out with them all the time in a sense. If I didn't find something compelling about them - even the "bad guys" - I'd be too bored to keep writing and revising.

Perhaps compelling is a better word for this discussion than likable.

Some of my favorite fictional characters are people I wouldn't want anywhere NEAR me in real life. Straight up villain protagonists, sometimes. But they need to be interesting. Not just blandly evil.

I haven't thought about female authors/characters being criticized for their likability more so than their male counterparts. I personally have been given the side-eye many times for admitting how much I enjoy certain male characters (Alex from A Clockwork Orange springs to mind).

One of the POV characters in Kiersten White's Mind Games does some truly terrible things, and her head is an uncomfortable place to be--I wouldn't call her "likable," but she definitely kept me invested in the story, and she's a sympathetic character. I have no idea if White ran into any backlash over her, but now I'm curious.

ETA @ CatchingADragon: For me, I find it easier to get on board with a character who knows damn well that they're a horrible person and just revels in it, or does what they do because they feel compelled or pressured in some way, rather than someone who tries to convince me on-page that they're not a bad guy, really, and have a reasonable justification for what they're doing, even though it's obvious they're horrible people. Back-peddling and making excuses for evil actions drive me up the wall.

Clicked the link, read the blurb and followed the link to the PW interview, which seemed to be a redacted or very short summary of the total interview. Quite frankly the question threw me off; what the heck kind of relevance does a character's likability have? The author's response was both accurately reactionary (putting interviewer in her place) and enlightening in her list of other authors' works and how truly unlikeable they can get.

This isn't social studies class. My opinion: Claire Messud's novel is a work of fiction. Gender-based influence on interpretation, as the Salon article implies, really has about as much influence on my appreciation of a work of fiction as what colour of shoelaces my daughter chose.

I didn't read Cujo by Stephen King because I particularly like dogs. I didn't read Lord of the Rings because I thought having a hobbit or maybe an elf for a friend would be cool. I won't read a political biography because I particularly like or even voted for the person, more as a way of gaining some insight on their term in power that the media certainly won't provide during that person's time in power.

Silly question aside, the interviewer even commented on some of the critiques:

Annasue McCleave Wilson · Fiction Reviewer at Publishers Weekly
Don't worry about the "poor reporter." The fact of the matter is that Messud and I had a much more expansive conversation about why readers read and why writers write, and it came down to the deep desire of both to explore literature in order to learn how to live. It's absurd to parse the question as Salon did, in terms of gender. I'm sorry to disappoint you, but gender never crossed my mind. The fact is, the question generated an instructive and enlightening response.

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I've never put much stock in the gender of the author having any particular impact on the story's success or impact, with a few notable exceptions - I don't care how much research a man does, child birth and rape are two subjects I honestly don't believe we could do an accurate and true enough representation of. In this case, a woman wrote a piece of fiction about a woman coping with a painful loss. All that should matter is whether she is a believable character that perchance may provide some insight into dealing with said scenario.

To me likeability isn't as important as interestability. The most likeable character in the world isn't gonna capture my attention for more than five minutes if there isn't something about him that piques my interest.

I found a really interesting blog on the subject by Aiden Donnely Rowley ( *here* ). She writes, in part:

So let me be clear—I don’t believe writers have a responsibility to make their main characters likeable. Look at LOLITA, one of the most beautiful and arresting books ever written, and it’s about a child molester. But I’d be lying if I said I didn’t think about likeability quite a bit while I’m writing and creating my main characters, and of course related to this, because I think they may be one and the same, I take much care in making sure that readers will enjoy my main character’s voice. Since I write in the first person, I do want the reader to be taken with that voice that’s leading them through three hundred and some pages, and to do that, I don’t necessarily need to make my character nice, or even likable, but I do have to make them engaging and interesting and someone that my reader wants to spend that time with.

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My personal, unscientific, probably biased conception is that male writers rarely concern themselves with whether their characters are likeable or even whether the reader will care about them. I could go on to posit what I think motivates this indifference, but I believe I'm not ready to be mobbed, burnt at the stake, then banned.

I have always believed that the key to a successful story was getting the reader to care about the characters.

Notice I used, 'care' not, 'like'.

It doesn't matter if they like them, hate them, feel sorry for them, or anything else, just so long as they have to turn the next page to see what happens next to them.

'The Day Of The Jackal' and 'The Spy Who Came In From The Cold' are just two examples of stories where the protagonist was not likeable, but very engaging.

One of the most popular characters I ever wrote about was a female vampire named Ria. She was, to put it bluntly, evil to the core. She loved manipulating people and ruining their lives just for entertainment. She thought nothing of maiming or brutally killing people simply because she was bored.

The readers all absolutely HATED her.

And she was by far and away my most popular character. Whenever she appeared in a chapter of my story the hits and reviews were guaranteed to spike.

Make your characters come to life. Make them three dimensional and real to the reader and you will have succeeded.

Buffysquirrel said:

My personal, unscientific, probably biased conception is that male writers rarely concern themselves with whether their characters are likeable or even whether the reader will care about them. I could go on to posit what I think motivates this indifference, but I believe I'm not ready to be mobbed, burnt at the stake, then banned.

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Seriously, it could be fun though.



(Two posts, two smilies. I've used up my yearly allotment.)

Rhoda Nightingale said:

ETA @ CatchingADragon: For me, I find it easier to get on board with a character who knows damn well that they're a horrible person and just revels in it, or does what they do because they feel compelled or pressured in some way, rather than someone who tries to convince me on-page that they're not a bad guy, really, and have a reasonable justification for what they're doing, even though it's obvious they're horrible people. Back-peddling and making excuses for evil actions drive me up the wall.

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Interesting. I never thought of it like that, but I think I agree. All the villainous characters I've been able to go along with for the sake of a story, like Sweeney Todd or Michael Corleone, make no excuses or false rationalizations for their evil, as if I'm supposed to agree with their evil. They know exactly what they're doing. Great insight!

Toothpaste said:

And 2. is likability really that important? Especially when creating characters for a fictional work?

Personally I am far more interested in complex characters than likeable ones (not that likeable ones can't be complex), and I am always surprised when people don't understand why I can enjoy a character who isn't likeable.

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Well, there have been a few threads on AW about this sort of thing, and in general, it appears the majority here agree with you. I am not sure if this is generally true of readers?

I prefer likeable characters. Now, IRL I like most people, and I think my threshold for considering a character likeable is pretty damn low. The reason I prefer likeable characters is that I just cannot care about a character if I don't like them, so I feel I have no reason to finish the book.

When people start listing off successful books with unlikeable MC's, it is usually a list of books I hated, couldn't finish, or have decided to never read. Whether or not they're classics. There is no changing my mind. This is the main reason I didn't like The Corrections, and this is the reason my dad gives for not liking Lolita. My boyfriend, on the other hand, couldn't care less about likeability, and enjoyed both of these books.

Anyways, I've pretty much come to the conclusion that either you want likeable characters, or you don't care, but you can't really convince someone to change their preference here. Likeable characters are definitely important to a not-insignificant segment of readers.


I have not thought about this issue much as it might relate to gender of the author or characters, but I have thought about it in terms of genre. Mainly, genre romance with unlikeable leads sounds pretty damn hard to pull off.

Toothpaste said:

But I'm not sure characters have to be likeable. Have any of you read SEATING ARRANGEMENTS? There are several main characters and think for the most part they are all relatively unlikable, especially the older male character. But I devoured it and highly enjoyed it. They weren't delicious villains which always have an appeal, they were deeply flawed and selfish people. I don't say I always want to read such books but I like a variety.

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Yup, I read this book. And...hmmm. There were parts I liked, but I could never love a book like this because of the unlikeable characters. Especially the MC. Some of the other characters were bearable. I could tolerate it a little better in this novel than in some others because it was a pretty funny book. The overall rating on Goodreads is actually rather low for this book, and the negative reviews generally mention the unlikeable characters. So clearly it was an issue for a lot of readers, though there were definitely people, like you, who loved it. And I can see how someone could love this book...but some things really didn't work for me at all.

On my e-reader, I have "good," "very good," and "favorites" collections. There is zero chance of a book getting into the last two collections if I found the MC unlikeable.

LOTLOF said:

'The Day Of The Jackal' and 'The Spy Who Came In From The Cold' are just two examples of stories where the protagonist was not likeable, but very engaging.

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My champion in this category is the first-person narrator Alex in A Clockwork Orange, by Anthony Burgess. William Faulkner made a Nobel Prize career writing about unlikeable characters.

But they were all damn interesting.

Back in the mid-19th century, Thomas Hughes wrote a novel called Tom Brown's School Days, possibly one of the most vapid titles ever. It was a huge best-seller about a goody-two-shoes schoolboy set at snooty Rugby, an exclusive public (meaning private) British place that still exists. Tom Brown was heavily beset upon by a nefarious bully named Flashman.

A few decades ago, George Macdonald Fraser hit upon the concept that the most interesting character in Hughes's largely forgotten book wasn't the "likeable" one, Tom Brown, but the bad guy, Flashman. He produced a long series of novels about what Flashman did as an adult, and he's no more "likeable" than he was in School Days, but he is a fascinating first-person narrator, and Fraser's books sold like hot dogs at Coney Island.

You don't need "likeable". You need "interesting".

caw

I prefer likeable characters. If I had to choose between complex and likeable, I'd choose likeable (though I'd prefer both). In some books, I find myself asking, "Why should I care about any of these people?"

But characters don't have to be models of perfection. I can deal with a lot of flaws if there's something I still like about the character. In fact, a perfect character is boring.

blacbird said:

A few decades ago, George Macdonald Fraser hit upon the concept that the most interesting character in Hughes's largely forgotten book wasn't the "likeable" one, Tom Brown, but the bad guy, Flashman. He produced a long series of novels about what Flashman did as an adult, and he's no more "likeable" than he was in School Days, but he is a fascinating first-person narrator, and Fraser's books sold like hot dogs at Coney Island.

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Hah, I just finished reading a 'Flashy' book (which I always hear in Rik Mayall's voice for some reason...now there's a man who made a career out of unlikeable characters). They are great fun to read. Flashy makes no bones about what sort of man he is, is searingly honest about his shortcomings in fact, perhaps that's what tips him from unlikeable to charismatic? Or is it the humour that tips it? I think it works better if you're going for humour, but can work elsewhere too.

And I read that as an antidote to a book I was reading about really nice, honourable, likeable people caught in a bad situation...and I got to 50 pages from the end and realised I didn't care if they lived or died so I put the book down. *


I think for me, it's not about likeable or unlikeable. It's about whether they live on the page (or screen, in film) for me. If they don't, I won't care about them. If they do, I'll read any book with them in it.

And in the end, what makes a character 'likeable' or 'charismatic' or whatever it is that makes a reader want to read more...it's highly subjective. I love a good rogue, myself, especially ones like Flashy who know that they're a rogue. I love brooding, noble warriors too, or any number of other archetypes. But if they come across as flat, you've lost me.


*However, I suspect I may not be a usual reader. The book is getting rave reviews. But I can't be that much alone, or ,say, Jack Sparrow wouldn't be as popular as he is.

blacbird said:

It was a huge best-seller about a goody-two-shoes schoolboy set at snooty Rugby, an exclusive public (meaning private) British place that still exists.

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If Tom's a goody-two-shoes, what on earth's Arthur?

Read to find friends? That's just silly. I read for entertainment, just like I watch NCIS for entertainment. I already have friends.

Main characters do not have to be likable, but if they aren't empathetic, it's like going to be a tough story to sell.