There are plenty of fictional characters who are dislikeable but so enjoyable to read, the great novels of the 19th and 20th century are packed with them. I think underlying this though is the dread word ‘relatable’, which perhaps has been conflated with likeability. I first came across the concept of ‘relatable’ characters about 15 years ago when the students I taught were beginning to struggle with longer, older books. Part of the problem seemed to be the distance between the reader and the text in terms of time, culture, mores, expectations. Relatability seems to me like the opposite of true empathy - it is wanting to find in stories people and situations that the reader can align with their own experiences and emotions, when actually, the whole point of great stories, of great literature, is for us as readers to explore different worlds and understand different experiences and emotions that take us out of our immediate comfort zone. I’ve ended up teaching a good deal of context, particularly the historical, social, political environment prior to reading, but I still have students struggling to read a story where the characters are so remote from their experience.
Totally agree with you on "relatability": you express really well the discomfort I have always had with it.
But I'm wondering what you mean by fictional characters who are "dislikeable but so enjoyable to read". My feeling is that the kind of character who is enjoyable to read is almost by definition "likable", no matter how much one disapproves of them. People like Count Fosco in The Woman in White, or Lydia Gwilt in Armadale, seem to me quintessentially likable villains - totally delightful and engaging on the page, no matter how awful the things they do are. Or did you have something else in mind?
For me, characters who are awful, terrible humans in literature include Agamemnon in the Iliad, the Pardoner in Chaucer, and then Iago or Regan and Goneril, but also, Sir Toby Belch, and in 19th century fiction, the Crawfords in Mansfield Park, St.John Rivers in Jane Eyre, Heathcliff, in Dickens, characters as varied as Murdstone and Mrs Jellyby, Angel Clare in Tess of the D’Urbervilles, the Buchanans in Gatsby, Grandcourt and Casaubon in Daniel Deronda and Middlemarch respectively, Gilbert Osmond. More recently, last year I read Olga Tokarczuk’s Books of Jacob, and the main character, Jacob Frank is horrendous. I think of books that create characters who take us to places of manipulation, cruelty and fear. Perhaps enjoyable isn’t the right word - enriching, enlightening, expansive, perhaps are better ways to think of these types of work.
In many of these novels the characters we dislike intently work upon the primary figure. Their existence as problematic people demands the primary character react, in some cases for the better, in some for the worse. Reading a novel with a disagreeable major character is often with the intent to see if they undergo reform or damnation. There is a certain murder mystery novel that is popular where the central figure is revealed by the end to be the murderer who completely escapes retribution. Often this knowledge is known to the character from the beginning but concealed from the reader. I despise these books for the dishonesty in the writing. An unlikable character should be known to the reader but the reader should be allowed to journey with them. If it’s compelling writing it is fascinating. Sometimes the journey is the point. Not if you like them.
We hate them. We wait for their downfall. But it has to be beautifully crafted so that we care enough to hate them.
Lately, the lines are more and more blurred. The character we hate is given a backstory and we have sympathy.
Or they do something kind, and it throws us.
Robert Mitchum’s Max Cady in the final scene….. he bursts through his menacing cool with such distilled rage on the boat that it kind of burns the scene into ashes.
Hmmm. That's interesting. I think I would regard some of those as positively enjoyable to read, in fact ... Iago, Sir Toby, Heathcliff, Mrs. Jellyby, for different reasons (Iago and Sir Toby for their wittiness, Heathcliff for the intensity of his passions, Mrs. Jellyby - well, because Dickens makes those scenes so funny that you just want more of them).
But the others, I totally agree with you: I don't find Angel Clare or Gilbert Osmond or Mr. Casaubon or St. John Rivers enjoyable to read, and they are SO dislikable, but we learn a lot about ourselves and the world through reading them!
Thanks for this, really enjoyed it. I find The Great Gatsby to be a good book for discussing likability of characters. Most people don’t like any of the characters but still find them compelling, which I think is generally a good thing. It leads to the point I think you’re making, which is that likability is a good starting point for getting into a book (and often a strategy of authors for readership) but is not required and certainly not enough for critically reading.
Lewes's Physiology of Common Life was very popular in the Russian nihilist circle, but its mention in Crime and Punishment is when Sonya is reading it while Rodion is plotting the murder. I can't say at that point Rodion was likable, but Sonya certainly was.
And certainly part of the appeal of Tertius Lydgate is that he is trying to bring medicine to the idea of treating mind and body, a hobbyhorse of Lewes's.
Wonderful piece! I had to print it out for re-reads and notes. :) Given your deep appreciation of Jane Austen I'm so curious about your initial reaction to Emma - how did you overcome your aversion? I ask in part because I have found in reading groups a problem: a character or characters become the obsessive target for criticism by one or more members of the group. Since emotions are catching this can befoul the entire experience which devolves into 'dissing' the characters instead of trying at least on some level to understand them!
To bolster your point, one of my favorite books is Anne of Green Gables precisely because its titular heroine is so likable and relatable (another dreaded word) to me. "Unlikable" (immoral, annoying, or otherwise unpalatable) characters can also give pleasure & entertainment to us as readers (Mr. Collins, a man I would not like to interact with IRL but who is hilarious on the page, comes to mind). I think Calder may partly have in mind readers whose definition of a "likable" character is so narrow that it excludes the unpalatable-likable type of character and only includes the Anne sort.
Wonderful last lines which underscore the entire point. Being critical and having feelings about characters isn't an either or. It's possible and important to do both.
I agree with you that I usually want to like the characters in books. The dictionary definition of likable is "having qualities that bring about a favorable regard."
I like Tom Ripley, a sociopathic murderer. He's intelligent, honest, and has good taste. Hannibal Lecter is a somewhat similar character. They have qualities that earn my favorable regard. I would not like to meet them in real life, but in the context of the fictional worlds they inhabit, which I observe from a place of safety, I like them. Frankly, I think their fictional worlds are designed to make them likable.
I've noticed, from attending book clubs, that some readers look at things differently. They might find it simply impossible to like a character who is a sociopathic murderer. The positive qualities just don't register once they clock the sociopathy.
I tend to think this debate about "likability" is really a debate about moral standards. I think the way we apply moral standards to fictional characters is related, at least partially, to how we apply moral standards in real life. And I guess I see a lot of moral perfectionism these days, applied to real people and fictional characters alike. I think moral perfectionism makes people unhappy (it's a symptom of obsessive compulsive disorder) and also makes them unable to appreciate characters like Tom Ripley and Hannibal Lecter.
So I agree with you, I usually want to like the characters I read. But I think when people write these screeds against "likability" they may be covertly railing against moral perfectionism.
I love The Talented Mr. Ripley and enjoyed the other Ripley novels. I don’t like Ripley . I don’t need to. I don’t like Patricia Highsmith. I enjoy her novels.
I simply could not enjoy a novel that spends so much time in the head of a character I did not like at some level. I think I have very different moral standards for fictional characters than real people, and that may make me unusual. To me, the best fiction approaches a kind of amorality, and Highsmith is certainly an expert at that.
What qualities make you like a character? When you read a character like Tom Ripley, who you find interesting but not likable, what are your feelings toward the plot? When I read the books, I am cheering for Ripley to get away with it.
Oh I’m much more detached. I’m an observer from a foreign country. To paraphrase L.P. Hartley- it’s a foreign country, they do things differently there.
"Their names are, in chronological order, Elizabeth Bennet, Diana Vernon, Argemone Lavington, Beatrix Esmond, and Barbara Grant."
How fascinating since I felt the same about Di Vernon. Not so much Elizabeth Bennet, though it's been a long time... The last three I'm sadly unfamiliar with. Others characters I recall being in love with are, in War and Peace, first Maria but at the end Sonya... The Lady of Shalott. Though with her it's rather more wanting to BE her. >_0.
"That’s why they find the character-based criticism of the great A.C. Bradley to be so mockable."
That is preposterous from them. Of the criticism I've read AC Bradley's work on Shakespeare is the best I think. Well, no wonder nearly all academic criticism is unreadable and concerned with irrelevant minutiae discussed at enormous, boring length besides.
"He tells us all he knows, all he suspects, and if these things take no account of the moral nature of man, it is because he has no window looking in that direction, and not because artistic scruples have compelled him to close it up. The very compact mansion in which he dwells presents on that side a perfectly dead wall."
This cynicism leads to an absence of likeable characters:
"Where does M. de Maupassant find the great multitude of his detestable women? or where at least does he find the courage to represent them in such colours?"
Clearly James did not think of fictional characters as substitute companions, and therefore best if likeable.
Is his criticism of Maupassant alleging a failure to hold the mirror up to nature, or a failure to engage the reader by providing sympathetic characters? Or a bit of both? I for one find these questions endlessly fascinating.
I think the focus on likeability is a bit narrow for what you're actually arguing. What you're essentially advocating, from what I can tell, is to be affectively invested in writing, and I totally agree! But I pity and/or grimace at everyone in Alice Munro's short stories, and that affective experience is not pleasant but it leads somewhere aesthetically. I love Cormac McCarthy, and almost zero of his characters are remotely likeable; that's not the point. I love liking a good character and I also love hating a good character. Affect is very broad, it's not just about the pleasantness of empathizing with a worthy person.
I think what this is missing is an extended discussion of the deeper critique of likeability--which is that very specific, narrow mores dictate what is or isn't likeable. The unlikeability problem is real. One of my favorite never-published novels, a friend's, had absolutely incredible prose but was tanked because (in large part) people could not get over the "unlikeability" of the protagonist. (And that "unlikeability" was definitely related to the gender of said protagonist.)
Characters certainly don't have to be likeable, but they do need to be interesting. An interesting character is far more entertaining than a likeable one. As I think about it, actually, most of the books I love have decidedly unlikeable characters, at least for a degree of time in their development. The Great Gatsby. Middlemarch. Even Emma. It's rare to find characters that are interesting and likeable from the start. Elizabeth Bennet is a rare bird indeed!
I basically agree with this - many writers create characters precisely with the intention that the readers will engage with them, will like them, indeed, and critics who miss that dimension are missing a lot of the point of the books. But I think there are a couple of nuances that need to be teased out.
First, I think you need to make a distinction between "liking" and "sympathizing with": both of those involve the kind of moral engagement you are talking about, but they are different things. I don't "like" Soames Forsyte - and I find it impossible to believe that Galsworthy intended his readers to "like" Soames Forsyte: he repeatedly emphasizes from the moment he is introduced just how dislikable and detestable he is in both his character and his behavior. But I SYMPATHIZE intensely with Soames: his desperate inability to understand why it is that Irene doesn't love him and can't love him, and his constant, tragic awareness that he is missing something terribly important in his own life through his reduction of everything to property relations and money. And our ethical engagement with Galsworthy depends fundamentally on that sympathy.
That's where Soames differs from (say) Falstaff, whom it is hard not to like no matter how much of a scoundrel he is - or even Iago, where we have to find him to some degree likable to understand how he can deceive and entrap the people around him. We can engage ethically there as well, but it's a different kind of ethical engagement from what we have with someone like Soames. It's also a difference from characters whom we initially like, but draw away from as the evil in them becomes more apparent: the Michael Corleones or Walter Whites.
Second, I think one needs to acknowledge that there is a class of writers who deliberately eschew "likability": they keep such a coolly severe distance from their characters that likability is really beside the point. Voltaire's Candide is an obvious one, but Flaubert's Salammbo might be a less obvious one. In both cases - the pervasive irony in Voltaire, or the deliberately alienating antiquarian horror in Flaubert - even to ask about "likability" would suggest that you've missed the point of the book.
But with the (many, perhaps majority of) books where the writer does clearly want you to like their characters, at least in part, you're absolutely right. And I think we judge a book's success or failure at least in part on how successful the author is at making us like the characters. Which is why Mansfield Park is my least favorite Austen (sorry! I just can't agree with you about Fanny, and I think Austen simply misjudged.)
I don't enjoy reading novels where no likeable character appears. I'll concede though that the work may have literary merit, although it seems diminishing possible. I also may be a philistine, blind, or deaf to certain qualities. Franzen's The Corrections is an example. It's a trope of TV series, but even then the anti-heroes are humanized. I find those novels emphasize social mores. I wouldn't recommend Updike or Ph. Roth for the ideas.
Thought provoking piece. My own view is that craft supersedes character likability. I don’t think it’s possible for characters to truly register as likable (or unlikable) if the writer’s skills aren’t up to snuff. I’m sure critics err too often in favor of valorizing craft, but that’s because it’s the backbone of the novel.
True. I've just finished Lonesome Dove, in which every single character was a challenge to me yet makes sense in their own world. Eventually you empathise, with some at least. A fantastic feat of minimalist world-building, and character development.
There are plenty of fictional characters who are dislikeable but so enjoyable to read, the great novels of the 19th and 20th century are packed with them. I think underlying this though is the dread word ‘relatable’, which perhaps has been conflated with likeability. I first came across the concept of ‘relatable’ characters about 15 years ago when the students I taught were beginning to struggle with longer, older books. Part of the problem seemed to be the distance between the reader and the text in terms of time, culture, mores, expectations. Relatability seems to me like the opposite of true empathy - it is wanting to find in stories people and situations that the reader can align with their own experiences and emotions, when actually, the whole point of great stories, of great literature, is for us as readers to explore different worlds and understand different experiences and emotions that take us out of our immediate comfort zone. I’ve ended up teaching a good deal of context, particularly the historical, social, political environment prior to reading, but I still have students struggling to read a story where the characters are so remote from their experience.
Totally agree with you on "relatability": you express really well the discomfort I have always had with it.
But I'm wondering what you mean by fictional characters who are "dislikeable but so enjoyable to read". My feeling is that the kind of character who is enjoyable to read is almost by definition "likable", no matter how much one disapproves of them. People like Count Fosco in The Woman in White, or Lydia Gwilt in Armadale, seem to me quintessentially likable villains - totally delightful and engaging on the page, no matter how awful the things they do are. Or did you have something else in mind?
For me, characters who are awful, terrible humans in literature include Agamemnon in the Iliad, the Pardoner in Chaucer, and then Iago or Regan and Goneril, but also, Sir Toby Belch, and in 19th century fiction, the Crawfords in Mansfield Park, St.John Rivers in Jane Eyre, Heathcliff, in Dickens, characters as varied as Murdstone and Mrs Jellyby, Angel Clare in Tess of the D’Urbervilles, the Buchanans in Gatsby, Grandcourt and Casaubon in Daniel Deronda and Middlemarch respectively, Gilbert Osmond. More recently, last year I read Olga Tokarczuk’s Books of Jacob, and the main character, Jacob Frank is horrendous. I think of books that create characters who take us to places of manipulation, cruelty and fear. Perhaps enjoyable isn’t the right word - enriching, enlightening, expansive, perhaps are better ways to think of these types of work.
In many of these novels the characters we dislike intently work upon the primary figure. Their existence as problematic people demands the primary character react, in some cases for the better, in some for the worse. Reading a novel with a disagreeable major character is often with the intent to see if they undergo reform or damnation. There is a certain murder mystery novel that is popular where the central figure is revealed by the end to be the murderer who completely escapes retribution. Often this knowledge is known to the character from the beginning but concealed from the reader. I despise these books for the dishonesty in the writing. An unlikable character should be known to the reader but the reader should be allowed to journey with them. If it’s compelling writing it is fascinating. Sometimes the journey is the point. Not if you like them.
We hate them. We wait for their downfall. But it has to be beautifully crafted so that we care enough to hate them.
Lately, the lines are more and more blurred. The character we hate is given a backstory and we have sympathy.
Or they do something kind, and it throws us.
Robert Mitchum’s Max Cady in the final scene….. he bursts through his menacing cool with such distilled rage on the boat that it kind of burns the scene into ashes.
That scene is a tour de force.
Hmmm. That's interesting. I think I would regard some of those as positively enjoyable to read, in fact ... Iago, Sir Toby, Heathcliff, Mrs. Jellyby, for different reasons (Iago and Sir Toby for their wittiness, Heathcliff for the intensity of his passions, Mrs. Jellyby - well, because Dickens makes those scenes so funny that you just want more of them).
But the others, I totally agree with you: I don't find Angel Clare or Gilbert Osmond or Mr. Casaubon or St. John Rivers enjoyable to read, and they are SO dislikable, but we learn a lot about ourselves and the world through reading them!
I agree - enjoyable to read, and enlightening. Twisty characters are essential to great fiction.
Thanks for this, really enjoyed it. I find The Great Gatsby to be a good book for discussing likability of characters. Most people don’t like any of the characters but still find them compelling, which I think is generally a good thing. It leads to the point I think you’re making, which is that likability is a good starting point for getting into a book (and often a strategy of authors for readership) but is not required and certainly not enough for critically reading.
Lewes's Physiology of Common Life was very popular in the Russian nihilist circle, but its mention in Crime and Punishment is when Sonya is reading it while Rodion is plotting the murder. I can't say at that point Rodion was likable, but Sonya certainly was.
And certainly part of the appeal of Tertius Lydgate is that he is trying to bring medicine to the idea of treating mind and body, a hobbyhorse of Lewes's.
I want to read it
I had respect for Lewes without knowing he was an Austen fanboy. Now he is my hero!
One of the great (and early) Austen critics
Wonderful piece! I had to print it out for re-reads and notes. :) Given your deep appreciation of Jane Austen I'm so curious about your initial reaction to Emma - how did you overcome your aversion? I ask in part because I have found in reading groups a problem: a character or characters become the obsessive target for criticism by one or more members of the group. Since emotions are catching this can befoul the entire experience which devolves into 'dissing' the characters instead of trying at least on some level to understand them!
I overcame it by growing up!
To bolster your point, one of my favorite books is Anne of Green Gables precisely because its titular heroine is so likable and relatable (another dreaded word) to me. "Unlikable" (immoral, annoying, or otherwise unpalatable) characters can also give pleasure & entertainment to us as readers (Mr. Collins, a man I would not like to interact with IRL but who is hilarious on the page, comes to mind). I think Calder may partly have in mind readers whose definition of a "likable" character is so narrow that it excludes the unpalatable-likable type of character and only includes the Anne sort.
Argemone Lavington!
Wonderful last lines which underscore the entire point. Being critical and having feelings about characters isn't an either or. It's possible and important to do both.
I agree with you that I usually want to like the characters in books. The dictionary definition of likable is "having qualities that bring about a favorable regard."
I like Tom Ripley, a sociopathic murderer. He's intelligent, honest, and has good taste. Hannibal Lecter is a somewhat similar character. They have qualities that earn my favorable regard. I would not like to meet them in real life, but in the context of the fictional worlds they inhabit, which I observe from a place of safety, I like them. Frankly, I think their fictional worlds are designed to make them likable.
I've noticed, from attending book clubs, that some readers look at things differently. They might find it simply impossible to like a character who is a sociopathic murderer. The positive qualities just don't register once they clock the sociopathy.
I tend to think this debate about "likability" is really a debate about moral standards. I think the way we apply moral standards to fictional characters is related, at least partially, to how we apply moral standards in real life. And I guess I see a lot of moral perfectionism these days, applied to real people and fictional characters alike. I think moral perfectionism makes people unhappy (it's a symptom of obsessive compulsive disorder) and also makes them unable to appreciate characters like Tom Ripley and Hannibal Lecter.
So I agree with you, I usually want to like the characters I read. But I think when people write these screeds against "likability" they may be covertly railing against moral perfectionism.
I love The Talented Mr. Ripley and enjoyed the other Ripley novels. I don’t like Ripley . I don’t need to. I don’t like Patricia Highsmith. I enjoy her novels.
I simply could not enjoy a novel that spends so much time in the head of a character I did not like at some level. I think I have very different moral standards for fictional characters than real people, and that may make me unusual. To me, the best fiction approaches a kind of amorality, and Highsmith is certainly an expert at that.
Whether I like a character has relatively little to do with whether I find that character of interest.
What qualities make you like a character? When you read a character like Tom Ripley, who you find interesting but not likable, what are your feelings toward the plot? When I read the books, I am cheering for Ripley to get away with it.
Oh I’m much more detached. I’m an observer from a foreign country. To paraphrase L.P. Hartley- it’s a foreign country, they do things differently there.
"Their names are, in chronological order, Elizabeth Bennet, Diana Vernon, Argemone Lavington, Beatrix Esmond, and Barbara Grant."
How fascinating since I felt the same about Di Vernon. Not so much Elizabeth Bennet, though it's been a long time... The last three I'm sadly unfamiliar with. Others characters I recall being in love with are, in War and Peace, first Maria but at the end Sonya... The Lady of Shalott. Though with her it's rather more wanting to BE her. >_0.
"That’s why they find the character-based criticism of the great A.C. Bradley to be so mockable."
That is preposterous from them. Of the criticism I've read AC Bradley's work on Shakespeare is the best I think. Well, no wonder nearly all academic criticism is unreadable and concerned with irrelevant minutiae discussed at enormous, boring length besides.
In his brilliant essay on Maupassant (available online: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/58471/58471-h/58471-h.htm#VIII), Henry James criticised Maupassant for his cynicism:
"He tells us all he knows, all he suspects, and if these things take no account of the moral nature of man, it is because he has no window looking in that direction, and not because artistic scruples have compelled him to close it up. The very compact mansion in which he dwells presents on that side a perfectly dead wall."
This cynicism leads to an absence of likeable characters:
"Where does M. de Maupassant find the great multitude of his detestable women? or where at least does he find the courage to represent them in such colours?"
Clearly James did not think of fictional characters as substitute companions, and therefore best if likeable.
Is his criticism of Maupassant alleging a failure to hold the mirror up to nature, or a failure to engage the reader by providing sympathetic characters? Or a bit of both? I for one find these questions endlessly fascinating.
I think the focus on likeability is a bit narrow for what you're actually arguing. What you're essentially advocating, from what I can tell, is to be affectively invested in writing, and I totally agree! But I pity and/or grimace at everyone in Alice Munro's short stories, and that affective experience is not pleasant but it leads somewhere aesthetically. I love Cormac McCarthy, and almost zero of his characters are remotely likeable; that's not the point. I love liking a good character and I also love hating a good character. Affect is very broad, it's not just about the pleasantness of empathizing with a worthy person.
I think what this is missing is an extended discussion of the deeper critique of likeability--which is that very specific, narrow mores dictate what is or isn't likeable. The unlikeability problem is real. One of my favorite never-published novels, a friend's, had absolutely incredible prose but was tanked because (in large part) people could not get over the "unlikeability" of the protagonist. (And that "unlikeability" was definitely related to the gender of said protagonist.)
Characters certainly don't have to be likeable, but they do need to be interesting. An interesting character is far more entertaining than a likeable one. As I think about it, actually, most of the books I love have decidedly unlikeable characters, at least for a degree of time in their development. The Great Gatsby. Middlemarch. Even Emma. It's rare to find characters that are interesting and likeable from the start. Elizabeth Bennet is a rare bird indeed!
I basically agree with this - many writers create characters precisely with the intention that the readers will engage with them, will like them, indeed, and critics who miss that dimension are missing a lot of the point of the books. But I think there are a couple of nuances that need to be teased out.
First, I think you need to make a distinction between "liking" and "sympathizing with": both of those involve the kind of moral engagement you are talking about, but they are different things. I don't "like" Soames Forsyte - and I find it impossible to believe that Galsworthy intended his readers to "like" Soames Forsyte: he repeatedly emphasizes from the moment he is introduced just how dislikable and detestable he is in both his character and his behavior. But I SYMPATHIZE intensely with Soames: his desperate inability to understand why it is that Irene doesn't love him and can't love him, and his constant, tragic awareness that he is missing something terribly important in his own life through his reduction of everything to property relations and money. And our ethical engagement with Galsworthy depends fundamentally on that sympathy.
That's where Soames differs from (say) Falstaff, whom it is hard not to like no matter how much of a scoundrel he is - or even Iago, where we have to find him to some degree likable to understand how he can deceive and entrap the people around him. We can engage ethically there as well, but it's a different kind of ethical engagement from what we have with someone like Soames. It's also a difference from characters whom we initially like, but draw away from as the evil in them becomes more apparent: the Michael Corleones or Walter Whites.
Second, I think one needs to acknowledge that there is a class of writers who deliberately eschew "likability": they keep such a coolly severe distance from their characters that likability is really beside the point. Voltaire's Candide is an obvious one, but Flaubert's Salammbo might be a less obvious one. In both cases - the pervasive irony in Voltaire, or the deliberately alienating antiquarian horror in Flaubert - even to ask about "likability" would suggest that you've missed the point of the book.
But with the (many, perhaps majority of) books where the writer does clearly want you to like their characters, at least in part, you're absolutely right. And I think we judge a book's success or failure at least in part on how successful the author is at making us like the characters. Which is why Mansfield Park is my least favorite Austen (sorry! I just can't agree with you about Fanny, and I think Austen simply misjudged.)
I don't enjoy reading novels where no likeable character appears. I'll concede though that the work may have literary merit, although it seems diminishing possible. I also may be a philistine, blind, or deaf to certain qualities. Franzen's The Corrections is an example. It's a trope of TV series, but even then the anti-heroes are humanized. I find those novels emphasize social mores. I wouldn't recommend Updike or Ph. Roth for the ideas.
Thought provoking piece. My own view is that craft supersedes character likability. I don’t think it’s possible for characters to truly register as likable (or unlikable) if the writer’s skills aren’t up to snuff. I’m sure critics err too often in favor of valorizing craft, but that’s because it’s the backbone of the novel.
True. I've just finished Lonesome Dove, in which every single character was a challenge to me yet makes sense in their own world. Eventually you empathise, with some at least. A fantastic feat of minimalist world-building, and character development.