I paused for a moment while listening to a radio interview with author Zoe Heller, promoting her new book The Believers. [Here's a pix of her which accompanies this National Public Radio story on the web.] She makes the point of explaining her work by saying "My hope, at least, is that I write difficult, complicated but sympathetic characters." And to further stress this, she continues [in a forceful tone] "I'm slightly irritated by what I think is a kind of modern demand for characters you can root for, characters you would like to be friends with. Speaking as a reader, I have to say that some of my favorite characters in literature are some of the nasty ones." Those comments caught me as I hear during book club sessions about novels with unlikeable characters.
Being in a book club focusing on mysteries (i.e. crime stories), how do we reconcile this? It--frequently, it seems with my book club--comes up that a novel doesn't have any likable characters. Is it a must to have a character to at least root for (redeemable wouldn't be strong enough here) to have a good reading experience? Or should readers just accept that too many fictional characters operate from their own their own selfish, narrow or jaded interests and that's their lives?
What do you think?
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