Tell me about a complicated man

What is it to hate a fictional character? Nino Sarratore, the Odyssey, weird-girl lit and likeability.

I suppose the first indication that the novel I was writing featured an unlikeable male character came during the editing process, when a comment in the margins appeared in the latest version of the manuscript. FUCKING JOHN, it read, and it occurred to me then that the line between a difficult man and what readers would deem ‘insufferable’ or ‘problematic’ or ‘an absolute prick’ might actually be very, very thin.

Since the book was published in May, the thinness of that line has become a little more clear. It doesn’t bother me that many readers have responded to Frida Slattery As Herself in this way. But it’s got me thinking more broadly about the idea of likeability in books.

All July I’ve been rereading the Neapolitan novels and there are no characters in these huge, sprawling novels that I hate. There are characters, including the narrator and her brilliant friend, whose fictional actions I am shocked or confused by. There are people behaving badly from the very first page. And of course, there is Nino Sarratore.

I joke about Nino Sarratore being a war criminal but he’s also the engine of much of the plot of the novels. Without him it might just be 1700 pages of Lenù and Lila playing with dolls together and comparing themselves to one another. And that’s not to say I put up with how terrible this one character is because it gives good plot. I’m not putting up with anything. I think I actually like that Nino is a war criminal (of the heart). I love a difficult person. Life, you know, is filled with them.

And to be honest, I do like being riled up. I spend quite a lot of time reading novels. I do that because I love it, and I find novels to be immensely entertaining. To be entertained for me is to be gripped by what I’m reading, to be given some way to feel emotionally connected to the world of the novel and characters I’m reading about. For that to work, sometimes those characters have to be a little fucked up. If everyone in the book was capital-g Good, wouldn’t that book all be a bit boring?

A genre I don’t read much of but am interested in, conceptually, is weird girl lit, characterised by difficult unreliable or frankly weird girl protagonists.

Fans of weird girl lit deeply want their female protagonists to be bad, or messy, or chaotic, or evil. They want them to be obstreperous, unloveable, to think fucked-up thoughts and do terrible things. These protagonists are given a lot of room to be bad people, room that is not really afforded to male characters in the same way right now.

(Wait, was Leopold Bloom the original literary weird girl?)

If you want a lot of five-star Goodreads reviews you don’t write a book about a difficult man. (If I was writing a novel to market right now I would probably write a weird-girl retelling of something like Citizen Kane from Susan’s POV.) But that was never something I cared about when I was writing Frida Slattery. Actually, I wasn’t writing with any idea that the novel might be read, nor that those readers might bring their own opinions about gender and art to the text. I wasn’t even thinking there would ultimately be a text. I was basically interested only in the very first line of Wilson’s The Odyssey:

Tell me about a complicated man

Can’t a man be a little complicated anymore?

I had that line pinned to the corkboard over my desk while I wrote the novel. Because to me, a huge amount of both life and literature was contained in that line. Last month, I said this to a bookshop full mostly of women readers and was met with plenty of nods - I said that it’s a very common experience in life to have someone you’re close to, or who you respect, who nevertheless does things you wouldn’t approve of or do yourself. And I was interested in how frustrating that is, especially for women. I was not interested in writing characters who are moral templates or virtue, or who are punished for their bad actions, or who experience redemption neatly before the narrative is tied up in a bow. Because none of that felt true to my life, nor to my own experience of the pleasures of reading, and so none of that was all that interesting to me.

(That event was in conversation with Jem Calder, whose excellent novel also features an unlikeable man and who wrote a great essay about the topic in last weekend’s FT.)

Also, there’s another aspect to this. My novel is about making art. And despite it being the major focus of cultural criticism for much of the 2010s, I am still not sure what we are supposed to do with the art made by problematic men.

Personally, I’m a woman who has been obsessed with the art of various problematic men since my early teens. Over the years I’ve thought about the topic plenty and I still don’t know how best to react when someone says something like, Well, you know David Foster Wallace pushed Mary Karr out of a moving car, right? I agree that’s terrible. It’s a violent crime and one of many he is alleged to have committed against women... I don’t know if it can stop me from thinking that Infinite Jest is a masterpiece… I don’t know if that terrible fact is an eraser that can take away the indelible mark that reading that book (three times!) at 20 made on me. I don’t know if not knowing that makes me a bad or immoral person…

Even now, after all those years of cultural criticism in this vein, I still don’t have a definitive take on what we should do with the good and enduring art made by dickheads and criminals. I think, maybe, it’s a question of holding multiple contradictory things in my head at the same time.

But I find it interesting, creatively, that I don’t know what to do with all of that. And since I find it so interesting, it’s going to end up in my fiction.

Now, the above is sort of a separate issue - the author does bad things vs the character does bad things - but also, is it? Obviously the author doing bad things is objectively worse, and to me as a reader far more troublesome. But both assume that I am looking to the art I consume for moral clarity, and that my enjoyment of something depends on a sense of virtue that I can associate with it.

The truth is that as a reader I don’t care about the virtue of it all. I love a grey area. One of my favourite things is when I get to discuss a novel with friends, share our interpretations of characters and behaviours and plot, and contrast how different our responses are. (Maybe that’s why I’ve found it fascinating rather than torturous to read my own Goodreads reviews!) I don’t think I look to fiction for moral clarity, or that I believe characters should either be punished or redeemed for their bad behaviour. In fact, I think I kind of like to read about the bad behaviour sometimes. I want things to be complicated. Complicated things, messy things, draw me in as a reader - just like the chaotic weird-girl protagonists do for their readers.

And what does that mean for me as a writer? Well, right now I am writing a novel again. I started it at MacDowell last year and put it aside for a bit when Frida was coming out. For a little while earlier this year, I tried to think about the characters on the page in terms of how readers might feel about them. Then I decided I didn’t care about any of that, that nothing truly good comes of wondering about such things, and I got back to work.