Several days ago I received an email from a woman who’d recently read my latest novel, Bird in Hand. She mentioned that she appreciated my “honesty” – she liked that my characters had “definite real quirks instead of being perfectly lovable all the time,” and discussed her own novel manuscript, currently facing rejection from publishers on the grounds that the characters “aren’t sympathetic enough.”
I don’t know anything about this woman’s manuscript. But the question of what it means to create sympathetic characters, and whether it matters, is an ongoing source of discussion and debate in writing classes and even among working novelists I know. Without alienating the reader, how does a writer create characters who embody the complexities of real-life experience – the petty preoccupations, self-delusions, and misplaced vanities that all of us possess; the qualities that, it could be argued, make us human?
Writing about Robert Stone’s story collection, Fun With Problems, in the New York Times Book Review several weeks ago, Antonya Nelson addresses this question head-on. Noting that Stone “declines to make his heroes ‘likable,” Nelson goes on to say, “The writer pays his reader the deep compliment of refusing to simplify his creations. They are as flawed and sophisticated and complex and conflicted and naughty and tempted and contradictory and brutal and surprising as readers themselves.” Nelson concludes the review by saying that Stone’s stories are not for everyone. “You might turn away from the uncomfortable truths you don’t wish to receive, from the mature, dissolute, ultimately heartbreaking rites of passage that fill these pages…. [But] Fun With Problems is a book for grown-ups, for people prepared to absorb the news of the world that it announces, for people both grateful and a little uneasy in finding a writer brave enough to be the bearer.”
The graduate students I teach tend to disdain the idea of the sympathetic character, viewing the entire notion as suspect. “Whether a character is likable or not is irrelevant in literary fiction,” they say. And they have a point. In certain – some might say formulaic – kinds of popular fiction (romantic comedies, detective stories, “chick” or “mommy” lit), the hero or heroine is expected to follow prescribed rules of likability. That is, she should be smart but unpretentious, fallible but fundamentally decent; life has knocked her around, but she remains optimistic and open to the world around her. These rules don’t apply to Robert Stone’s characters; his readers expect to be left feeling a little uneasy as they ponder uncomfortable truths.
But I think that generally what readers want from a character — even in commercial fiction — is something more complex than likability. They want to understand the character’s (or, in the case of memoir, the writer’s) motivations, whether or not they can empathize with him or her. A character’s likability is largely irrelevant. What matters is that the character is richly developed in three dimensions.
In my work as a manuscript editor I have found that there are lots of ways to improve a book that isn’t working, but one of the hardest things to fix is a story in which you don’t relish the thought of spending 300 pages in the central character’s world. There are all kinds of reasons for this: the character isn’t developed enough; he’s too much of a caricature; the author makes him superficially ornery, irritable, and quirky (rarely a winning combination) as a way to incite drama that would otherwise be lacking. Whatever the reasons, these characters are wooden, lifeless. They don’t live and breathe. True, the character may be unlikable. But more significant is that he is not fully developed.
Lots of books are published – great books – with difficult and irascible central characters. These are the ones that Antonya Nelson calls books “for grownups.” But there’s a difference between these books and the manuscripts that languish unpublished because the characters aren’t rich or deep or full enough, their unlikability a problem of the writer’s, not the reader’s.
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This made me immediately think of Mario Puzo. Don Corleone is by no means a sympathetic character: he’s rich, he’s a gangster, he has people killed, deals in prostitution and violence. But Puzo gets around that by starting off with the wedding. The first image of Corleone (in the book and the movie), is one of him granting favors to people of Little Italy who feel like they have no one else to turn to. Money, protection, retribution. As morally flexible as he is with the laws of the land, he’s loyal to his people and his friends. So while he’s not exactly likable, he IS empathetic.
Another example: NOTES ON A SCANDAL: WHAT WAS SHE THINKING by Zoe Heller. Irritable, unstable, bitter, scheming schoolteacher Barbara Covett is also fascinating [and comical at times]. She is such a dark character, leavened by Sheba, who is naive, flirtatious, young & beautiful [the opposite].
Love this, and your blog! Found via “a year of getting up to meet the day”. The Gollum pic great for this topic (all my family love Gollum—there are those of us who are more interested in the “unsympathetic” characters than the Mary Sues…).
Of course, am influenced by the fact that all three of my kids write fantasy adventure novels…Needless to say, they are all planning on day jobs. We all write on the side, as I tiresomely intone that the chances of anyone making a living at it, let alone a name, are about as remote as a talented basketball-playing kid in the projects becoming a multimillionaire pro.
Good point about “do I want to spend 300 pp with this character?”
One of my favorite authors (who is good at drawing one into a character who is not classically likable) is Mark Helprin. And then there is always Walker Percy. Alexander McCall Smith’s female detective is one of my all-time favorite fictional characters. But I find that many of the male novelists, from Salinger to Mailer/Nabokov/Mailer/Capote (that one is expected to have read and admired), write repellent books with characters so foul one feels depressed and grimy after reading them. I’m not interested in male meditations on body parts or perversions and yet so many of the female novelists endlessly rehash finding oneself, and radical feminism and finding oneself by abandoning one’s responsibilities, and devil take the children… Yet I can’t stomach the bilge that is sentimental Christian fiction or romance literature either (can you tell that I read mostly non-fiction these days?).
Our family is shy and retiring and socially conservative in real life and we tend to prefer 19th-century and early 20th-century novelists. And poetry (but not much past Plath and Frost/Auden). Because we dive into books, lose ourselves in imagery and metaphor and convoluted stories and adventures and conflicts between love, duty, honor, romance, adventure–escape. One has enough trouble dealing with psychodramas in family life that one doesn’t want to read about them in fiction.
Perhaps it is presumptuous, but the people in my family write the kinds of books they wish they could find to read, and can’t…
I’m a verbose nobody, obviously, but in all the endless hand-wringing about how people nowadays don’t read any more, the unanswered question is still whether anything worth reading is being written (or at least published) these days.
My children were in one of those young critics’ clubs at our library with a librarian leading it who was on most of the childrens book committees, Caldecott, etc. and the young adult fiction they read and reviewed (often before publication) was 90 percent garbage, PC, and devoid of religious, ethical or patriotic themes. My kids would often skewer them. I’m not at all nostalgic for the tedious Dickens I was forced to read in school at that age, but his characters were certainly better than the ones they had to discuss.
I think there is a relationship between the challenge of creating characters that draw one in, even if (or because?) they are unsympathetic, and the relative dearth of heroic or altruistic themes in the narcissistic excess of so much modern fiction. When the self is the God, and the highest goal, the characters just aren’t that interesting.
Our brooding, self-absorbed age has produced some spectacular confessional literature, though. Yes, there is too much autobiography (and I would never vote for a politician who wrote an autobiography before they were at least 70 and had accomplished something of value), but things like Carolyn Knapp’s work are spectacular. A lot of the “autobiographical” literature about mental illness and drugs turns out to be fiction, or slanted, or to demonstrate just how out of touch the authors are, BUT they make for great reads. That Million Little Pieces author was repulsive, but one couldn’t put it down. He told a great yarn.
I haven’t written fiction myself, though I am fooling around with a fictionalized version of some of the exploits of some of the insane and/or adventurous members of the family (with one of those “all similarities are accidental” disclaimers so that the obnoxious relatives don’t sue me for writing about their Emperors having no clothes). I’ve always mostly read and written non-fiction. However, as a reader, editor, cheerleader and ruthless critic of my three childrens’ thousands of pages of poetry, short stories and novels, my constant theme is “make me want to turn the page. Make me want to find out more about this character.” I use the analogy of a shrink and a patient: some of the most interesting and challenging patients , that inspire the best work by therapists, doctors and analysts, would in fact be very difficult to live with. Yet they have so much to them.
As far as unsympathetic characters I’ve read recently: my son on the autistic spectrum created the most amazing character of a female she-demon possessing her human husband who is sometimes uncomfortably like my own snarky badgering tone, sometimes mocking people like his sister, sometimes echoing a mad relative of ours, and we all rip the pages out of the printer as he produces them. Because the character is sometimes so wicked one can’t stop reading about her.
Excuse the blather, but a subject dear to my heart, though a mere consumer…