Hurricane Season by Fernanda Melchior is full of unlikeable characters, brutally so. Even though it is full of violence, scenes written to disgust, characters who evoke miserable pity at best.It was one of the most phenomenally compelling and beautiful books I read last year.
I also find that often in book groups my co-readers often dislike 'unlikeable' women, but I find myself drawn to them, or even relating to them. Most notably: Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offil.
Dept. of Speculation is a good example of the double standard I think female characters are held to. The ambivalence the narrator expresses towards her own marriage seems to read as unlikable to many, but that book is a real favorite of mine.
A few years ago I read "Serena" by Ron Rash. An incredibly nasty human being but I found the story intriguing. At least she got her due in the end...it just took a long time. I find most of the characters in Jonathon Franzen's books unlikeable to the extent I do not want to finish the book because I do not care what happens to them.
Serena is a real villain type, though a potent one for much of the novel. Franzen revels in his characters' warts - it's pretty much why he seems to write - but that's what I enjoy about them. He would've been a great example.
Bret Easton Ellis gets the award for obviously actually being an asshole and writing metafiction about how much an asshole he is. Patrick Bateman of American Psycho is of course not great company, but how I enjoyed his reviews of Whitney Houston, Phil Collins and Huey Lewis. Also, everyone in Franzen's Corrections is just *awful* ( except Denise) but the scene between Chip and Alfred at the end properly had me weeping.
Patrick Bateman is an interesting example, part of the American grotesque, a character who revels in it, which strangely makes him a little sympathetic, even though we know him as a monster.
I recently read "Vladimir" by Julia May Jonas. It's definitely a play on Nabokov but it was an interesting novel narrated by an unlikeable character. It's about a female professor whose husband has been caught up in sexual misconduct scandal. She doesn't even care about his victims! She thinks they're wimps. Her main resentment is how this all affects her life. Meanwhile, she begins an unhealthy obsession for a younger professor, Vladimir, who has just joined the college. I loved the book, and tore through it. But .... I immediately eliminated it as a book to suggest for my Book Club for the reasons you mentioned. A common refrain when criticizing a book at my club is "I couldn't relate to the character". I just feel like people don't understand what the homework assignment is! I feel that is a limiting view of what fiction can be. I want to read about characters for which I have nothing in common with. But like you said, people don't like those types of characters. And they mostly don't want to read those kinds of books.
I am also a fan of Succession but I was astonished seeing how small its audience is in relation to the hype in the media about it. I guess it's like golf. It has the right audience. But its genius is to get you to engage with truly loathsome characters over and over again. I get few takers to watch the show with me!
Succession's audience is really quite tiny relative to the amount of discussion it generates, but as you say it appeals to the cultural take-havers (like me, I guess) who feel compelled to air their two cents about it.
When people say that a character is 'unlikable' I feel that what they actually mean is that the character is not understandable. If we didn't understand where Walter White was coming from Breaking Bad wouldn't have been such a big hit. Unlikable is fine as long as we learn why they are that way.
I both agree and disagree with this to some extent. Walter White is a great example of an anti-hero where he's doing morally bad things, but the audience is still positioned to find him sympathetic - though maybe not all the way to likable - in those actions. There are a couple of serious tests of that that I won't spoil for others who might still see the show, but for me, that's one of the great parts of the show, that it establishes some sympathy for Walter and then see how far it can stretch us.
I think at the end, where the show signals where Walter is coming from though some of the early seasons vs. what Walter comes to believe about himself are at odds. By the end, he seems to grasp that he was drawn to be powerful/important, more unlikable. I think the knowing where he was coming from was a bit of a red herring planted by the show in order to pay it off by switching it up later.
I struggle with unlikeable characters on the whole, but one book that came to mind for me that I loved was Notes on a Scandal. The narrator was so delightfully nasty.
Having just reread Curtis Sittenfeld's American Wife, I confess I'm intrigued by the idea of Tucker Carlson fiction, perhaps from the point of view of a more sympathetic character. But I guess the reason that worked is that GWB has some redeeming/likeable qualities as a human being, just not as a president--probably not true for Tucker.
P.S. I wish I could get back the hours of my life that I wasted watching Breaking Bad.
I think the key to writing an unlikable character is thoroughly understanding the character - why he acts like he does, why he thinks the things he thinks, etc. Your description of Tucker Carlson as a white supremacist Qanon whatever (white people LOVE talking about white supremacists for some reason) is completely has been spoonfed to you by MSNBC and you swallowed so much of it, you internalized it and are writing characters based on it. But what will likely happen is you write a boring cliche character that doesn't really make much sense because it's not inspired by anything real. I could be wrong and the character is great, despite the misguided inspiration.
For what it's worth, I haven't watch more than three minutes of MSNBC since the 2016 election, so I'm confident that my impression is based much more on watching Tucker Carlson's show and digital content (which is even more racist), which I have done a fair amount of, given my curiosity about what is going on inside the man.
The key to writing any character is understanding the character. The point, which apparently flew past, is that the internal state of Tucker Carlson is unknowable - the stuff of fiction - and is of interest to me as a writer/reader who enjoys explorations of the unlikable. Ultimately were I to continue with the story, whatever comes would increasingly and necessarily be pure invention. Anything else would indeed result in an uninteresting character. But that result would have no necessary relationship to the unknowable reality of Tucker Carlson's interior life, even if aspects of his knowable life were the jumping off point.
NY Times and NPR are carbon copies of MSNBC in terms of political opinion. The Times and NPR might use bigger words from time to time, but the end result is the same. The link you posted is exactly what I'm talking about: Democrat-leaning media portrays a popular figure on the so-called right as a white supremacist because they know their 87% white audience salivates over that like a cartoon dog staring at roasted chicken in a window. I love that it's two white people calling another white guy racist and the white audience feels good about themselves for agreeing. Sums it up perfectly. And that's my point - the inspiration for your character is already a fictional character that was created for propaganda purposes.
I understand that this is the nature of "discourse" online, but seriously, everything you have to say here is just kind of dumb. The notion that people take their marching orders from the opinion makers at big places like the Times or NPR is silly.
Look at my archives or my higher education blog at Inside Higher Ed to see what I have to say about the opinion makers at the Times and see if it seems like I agree with them about politics.
I'll make my point again since you seem a little slow on the uptake. Look at what I describe as the impetus for the character, the disconnect between what adult Tucker Carlson himself says about his teacher, and what the teacher recalls about young Tucker. That is interesting. The point is that the public Tucker, that self-congratulatory edgelords who like to treat over racism as just a little light entertainment for the masses and we shouldn't take it so seriously, is not at all interesting.
No need for insults. But it's obvious you're angry and bitchy, so I'll leave you be. Good luck on your story and stop fantasizing about white supremacy.
I run a few book clubs and a recurring viewpoint of readers is a need to “like” the “likeable” characters. I usually say that some authors seem to weave magic and nudge you to identify with bad people. As you say, such people are often so interesting, something I’ve also found in life. I adore Succession but go further than most, saying that I do “like” (in some sense) all three of them. My most recent example of the “bad” character comes from the magnificent novel The Lincoln Highway by Amor Towles. All my book clubs have read it and universally they all hate amoral Duchess, whereas he, to me, is not only most fascinating character but someone I found myself wishing I could be (if only for a moment).
I have had moments of watching Succession where "feel" for the characters, and I am entertained by them (particularly Tom), but I can't say that I like them in the sense that I could imagine being friends with them should they exist in the real world. They are good, well-drawn characters though, which makes them compelling.
I think we're actually supposed to like him and identify with him somewhat, based on how the text presents him, but Goethe's *Faust* is an entertainingly unlikable character (at least, until you reach the second part of the play).
It's been fascinating to read the mirror of this commentary among video gamers in recent months as the indie video game developer Project Moon included a genderswapped version of Goethe's Faust in their latest game, *Limbus Company,* and people familiar with the form of the game but not the developer nor the source material are wildly upset to discover *Faust is a terrible person.*
Great example. Faust is an object of fascination, and our own fascination becomes a kind of indictment later when we realize we've been fascinated with that terrible person. I love that kind of effect in a narrative.
I hadn't thought about Boyle, but I've read a bunch of his novels and you're right. He seems drawn to eccentrics as characters and that makes them at the very least odd, and often unlikable. But interesting!
I find it hard, like a guilt trip, when a deeply unlikeable character in fiction is played on stage or screen in such a way that you can't help laughing with him or her. Eg a production of Richard 3rd I saw played by Anthony Sher that had the audience in stitches at his evilness. For the most part, I think unpleasant characters are far more interesting, as long as I don't have to spend time with them in real life.
On the subject of Lolita, I wrote a book review on substack saying I found it so horrible that I couldn't finish it, and several female readers urged me to do so.
Some I've seen written off as unlikeable, but that I loved, include Normal People by Sally Rooney ("miserable"), The Secret History by Donna Tarrt ("pretentious"), The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo ("Evelyn sucks"), Gone Girl ("horrible"), and anything now described as "toxic masculinity" like Bret Easton Ellis, mentioned already in the comments. I've read plenty of books with characters I didn't like, but most of those tend to be (I have now discovered thanks to you) Upmarket Fiction.
Sally Rooney is a great current example. As someone a generation (or maybe two) removed from her characters, I really enjoy getting a window into their lives. I don't know how universal or accurate her portrayal of the lives of young people might be, but I find them absolutely fascinating.
Hurricane Season by Fernanda Melchior is full of unlikeable characters, brutally so. Even though it is full of violence, scenes written to disgust, characters who evoke miserable pity at best.It was one of the most phenomenally compelling and beautiful books I read last year.
I also find that often in book groups my co-readers often dislike 'unlikeable' women, but I find myself drawn to them, or even relating to them. Most notably: Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offil.
Dept. of Speculation is a good example of the double standard I think female characters are held to. The ambivalence the narrator expresses towards her own marriage seems to read as unlikable to many, but that book is a real favorite of mine.
A few years ago I read "Serena" by Ron Rash. An incredibly nasty human being but I found the story intriguing. At least she got her due in the end...it just took a long time. I find most of the characters in Jonathon Franzen's books unlikeable to the extent I do not want to finish the book because I do not care what happens to them.
Serena is a real villain type, though a potent one for much of the novel. Franzen revels in his characters' warts - it's pretty much why he seems to write - but that's what I enjoy about them. He would've been a great example.
Bret Easton Ellis gets the award for obviously actually being an asshole and writing metafiction about how much an asshole he is. Patrick Bateman of American Psycho is of course not great company, but how I enjoyed his reviews of Whitney Houston, Phil Collins and Huey Lewis. Also, everyone in Franzen's Corrections is just *awful* ( except Denise) but the scene between Chip and Alfred at the end properly had me weeping.
Patrick Bateman is an interesting example, part of the American grotesque, a character who revels in it, which strangely makes him a little sympathetic, even though we know him as a monster.
I recently read "Vladimir" by Julia May Jonas. It's definitely a play on Nabokov but it was an interesting novel narrated by an unlikeable character. It's about a female professor whose husband has been caught up in sexual misconduct scandal. She doesn't even care about his victims! She thinks they're wimps. Her main resentment is how this all affects her life. Meanwhile, she begins an unhealthy obsession for a younger professor, Vladimir, who has just joined the college. I loved the book, and tore through it. But .... I immediately eliminated it as a book to suggest for my Book Club for the reasons you mentioned. A common refrain when criticizing a book at my club is "I couldn't relate to the character". I just feel like people don't understand what the homework assignment is! I feel that is a limiting view of what fiction can be. I want to read about characters for which I have nothing in common with. But like you said, people don't like those types of characters. And they mostly don't want to read those kinds of books.
I am also a fan of Succession but I was astonished seeing how small its audience is in relation to the hype in the media about it. I guess it's like golf. It has the right audience. But its genius is to get you to engage with truly loathsome characters over and over again. I get few takers to watch the show with me!
Succession's audience is really quite tiny relative to the amount of discussion it generates, but as you say it appeals to the cultural take-havers (like me, I guess) who feel compelled to air their two cents about it.
When people say that a character is 'unlikable' I feel that what they actually mean is that the character is not understandable. If we didn't understand where Walter White was coming from Breaking Bad wouldn't have been such a big hit. Unlikable is fine as long as we learn why they are that way.
I both agree and disagree with this to some extent. Walter White is a great example of an anti-hero where he's doing morally bad things, but the audience is still positioned to find him sympathetic - though maybe not all the way to likable - in those actions. There are a couple of serious tests of that that I won't spoil for others who might still see the show, but for me, that's one of the great parts of the show, that it establishes some sympathy for Walter and then see how far it can stretch us.
I think at the end, where the show signals where Walter is coming from though some of the early seasons vs. what Walter comes to believe about himself are at odds. By the end, he seems to grasp that he was drawn to be powerful/important, more unlikable. I think the knowing where he was coming from was a bit of a red herring planted by the show in order to pay it off by switching it up later.
Thank you for the most truthful and hilarious comment I have read today (and I read 2 excellent papers):
Tucker Carlson is an asshole!
That just covered the cost of the subscription. The rest of the column is icing.
I struggle with unlikeable characters on the whole, but one book that came to mind for me that I loved was Notes on a Scandal. The narrator was so delightfully nasty.
Having just reread Curtis Sittenfeld's American Wife, I confess I'm intrigued by the idea of Tucker Carlson fiction, perhaps from the point of view of a more sympathetic character. But I guess the reason that worked is that GWB has some redeeming/likeable qualities as a human being, just not as a president--probably not true for Tucker.
P.S. I wish I could get back the hours of my life that I wasted watching Breaking Bad.
I think the key to writing an unlikable character is thoroughly understanding the character - why he acts like he does, why he thinks the things he thinks, etc. Your description of Tucker Carlson as a white supremacist Qanon whatever (white people LOVE talking about white supremacists for some reason) is completely has been spoonfed to you by MSNBC and you swallowed so much of it, you internalized it and are writing characters based on it. But what will likely happen is you write a boring cliche character that doesn't really make much sense because it's not inspired by anything real. I could be wrong and the character is great, despite the misguided inspiration.
For what it's worth, I haven't watch more than three minutes of MSNBC since the 2016 election, so I'm confident that my impression is based much more on watching Tucker Carlson's show and digital content (which is even more racist), which I have done a fair amount of, given my curiosity about what is going on inside the man.
The key to writing any character is understanding the character. The point, which apparently flew past, is that the internal state of Tucker Carlson is unknowable - the stuff of fiction - and is of interest to me as a writer/reader who enjoys explorations of the unlikable. Ultimately were I to continue with the story, whatever comes would increasingly and necessarily be pure invention. Anything else would indeed result in an uninteresting character. But that result would have no necessary relationship to the unknowable reality of Tucker Carlson's interior life, even if aspects of his knowable life were the jumping off point.
But in terms of his externally knowable actions, Carlson's world view seems pretty darn clear. This discussion does a good job of capturing where I come down. https://www.npr.org/2022/05/12/1098488908/has-tucker-carlson-created-the-most-racist-show-in-the-history-of-cable-news
NY Times and NPR are carbon copies of MSNBC in terms of political opinion. The Times and NPR might use bigger words from time to time, but the end result is the same. The link you posted is exactly what I'm talking about: Democrat-leaning media portrays a popular figure on the so-called right as a white supremacist because they know their 87% white audience salivates over that like a cartoon dog staring at roasted chicken in a window. I love that it's two white people calling another white guy racist and the white audience feels good about themselves for agreeing. Sums it up perfectly. And that's my point - the inspiration for your character is already a fictional character that was created for propaganda purposes.
I understand that this is the nature of "discourse" online, but seriously, everything you have to say here is just kind of dumb. The notion that people take their marching orders from the opinion makers at big places like the Times or NPR is silly.
Look at my archives or my higher education blog at Inside Higher Ed to see what I have to say about the opinion makers at the Times and see if it seems like I agree with them about politics.
I'll make my point again since you seem a little slow on the uptake. Look at what I describe as the impetus for the character, the disconnect between what adult Tucker Carlson himself says about his teacher, and what the teacher recalls about young Tucker. That is interesting. The point is that the public Tucker, that self-congratulatory edgelords who like to treat over racism as just a little light entertainment for the masses and we shouldn't take it so seriously, is not at all interesting.
No need for insults. But it's obvious you're angry and bitchy, so I'll leave you be. Good luck on your story and stop fantasizing about white supremacy.
I run a few book clubs and a recurring viewpoint of readers is a need to “like” the “likeable” characters. I usually say that some authors seem to weave magic and nudge you to identify with bad people. As you say, such people are often so interesting, something I’ve also found in life. I adore Succession but go further than most, saying that I do “like” (in some sense) all three of them. My most recent example of the “bad” character comes from the magnificent novel The Lincoln Highway by Amor Towles. All my book clubs have read it and universally they all hate amoral Duchess, whereas he, to me, is not only most fascinating character but someone I found myself wishing I could be (if only for a moment).
I have had moments of watching Succession where "feel" for the characters, and I am entertained by them (particularly Tom), but I can't say that I like them in the sense that I could imagine being friends with them should they exist in the real world. They are good, well-drawn characters though, which makes them compelling.
I think we're actually supposed to like him and identify with him somewhat, based on how the text presents him, but Goethe's *Faust* is an entertainingly unlikable character (at least, until you reach the second part of the play).
It's been fascinating to read the mirror of this commentary among video gamers in recent months as the indie video game developer Project Moon included a genderswapped version of Goethe's Faust in their latest game, *Limbus Company,* and people familiar with the form of the game but not the developer nor the source material are wildly upset to discover *Faust is a terrible person.*
Great example. Faust is an object of fascination, and our own fascination becomes a kind of indictment later when we realize we've been fascinated with that terrible person. I love that kind of effect in a narrative.
I seem to gravitate to unlikable characters!
A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
The Visitors - Jessi Jezewska Stevens
Call Me Zebra - Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi
Stephen Florida - Gabe Habash
most of T.C. Boyle's characters
I'm probably forgetting so so many at the moment!
I hadn't thought about Boyle, but I've read a bunch of his novels and you're right. He seems drawn to eccentrics as characters and that makes them at the very least odd, and often unlikable. But interesting!
I find it hard, like a guilt trip, when a deeply unlikeable character in fiction is played on stage or screen in such a way that you can't help laughing with him or her. Eg a production of Richard 3rd I saw played by Anthony Sher that had the audience in stitches at his evilness. For the most part, I think unpleasant characters are far more interesting, as long as I don't have to spend time with them in real life.
On the subject of Lolita, I wrote a book review on substack saying I found it so horrible that I couldn't finish it, and several female readers urged me to do so.
Some I've seen written off as unlikeable, but that I loved, include Normal People by Sally Rooney ("miserable"), The Secret History by Donna Tarrt ("pretentious"), The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo ("Evelyn sucks"), Gone Girl ("horrible"), and anything now described as "toxic masculinity" like Bret Easton Ellis, mentioned already in the comments. I've read plenty of books with characters I didn't like, but most of those tend to be (I have now discovered thanks to you) Upmarket Fiction.
Sally Rooney is a great current example. As someone a generation (or maybe two) removed from her characters, I really enjoy getting a window into their lives. I don't know how universal or accurate her portrayal of the lives of young people might be, but I find them absolutely fascinating.