Bad Feminist: Essays (11 page)

In the movie
Young Adult
, Charlize Theron stars as Mavis Gary. Nearly every review of the movie raises her character’s unlikability, painting her with a bright scarlet
U
. Based on this character’s critical reception, an unlikable woman embodies any number of unpleasing but entirely human characteristics. Mavis is beautiful, cold, calculating, self-absorbed, full of odd tics, insensitive, and largely dysfunctional in nearly every aspect of her life. These are, apparently, unacceptable traits for a woman, particularly given the sheer number working in concert. Some reviews go so far as to suggest that Mavis is mentally ill, because there’s nothing more reliable than armchair diagnosis by disapproving critics. In his review, Roger Ebert lauds
Young Adult
screenwriter Diablo Cody for making Mavis an alcoholic because “without such a context, Mavis would simply be insane.” Ebert and many others require an explanation for Mavis’s behavior. They require a diagnosis for her unlikability in order to tolerate her. The simplest explanation, of Mavis as human, will not suffice.

In many ways, likability is a very elaborate lie, a performance, a code of conduct dictating the proper way to be. Characters who don’t follow this code become unlikable. Critics who criticize a character’s unlikability cannot necessarily be faulted. They are merely expressing a wider cultural malaise with all things unpleasant, all things that dare to breach the norm of social acceptability.

Why is likability even a question? Why are we so concerned with whether, in fact or fiction, someone is likable?
Unlikable
is a fluid designation that can be applied to any character who doesn’t behave in a way the reader finds palatable. Lionel Shriver notes, in an essay for the
Financial Times
, that “this ‘liking’ business has two components: moral approval and affection.” We need characters to be lovable while they do right.

Some might suggest that this likability question is a by-product of an online culture in which we reflexively click “Like” or “Favorite” on every status update and bit of personal trivia shared on social networks. Certainly there is a culture of relentless affirmation online, but it would be shortsighted to believe that this desire to be liked, this desire to express what or whom we like, begins or ends with the Internet. I have no doubt that Abraham Maslow has some ideas about this persistent desire, in so many of us, to be liked and, in turn, to belong, to have our deftness at following the proper code of conduct affirmed.

As a writer and a person who has struggled with likability—being likable, wanting to be liked, wanting to belong—I have spent a great deal of time thinking about likability in the stories I read and those I write. I am often drawn to unlikable characters, to those who behave in socially unacceptable ways, say whatever is on their mind, and do what they want with varying levels of regard for the consequences. I want characters to do bad things and get away with their misdeeds. I want characters to think ugly thoughts and make ugly decisions. I want characters to make mistakes and put themselves first without apologizing for it.

I don’t even mind unlikable characters whose behavior is psychopathic or sociopathic. This is not to say I condone, for example, murder, but Patrick Bateman, in
American Psycho
, is a very interesting man. There is a psychiatric diagnosis for his unlikability, a deviant pathology, but he has his charms, particularly in his scathing self-awareness. Serial killers are people too, and sometimes they are funny. “My conscience,” Bateman thinks in the novel, “my pity, my hopes disappeared a long time ago (probably at Harvard) if they ever did exist.”

I want characters to do the things I am afraid to do for fear of making myself more unlikable than I may already be. I want characters to be the most honest of all things—human.

That the question of likability even exists in literary conversations is odd. It implies that we are engaging in a courtship. When characters are unlikable, they don’t meet our mutable, varying standards. Certainly we can find kinship in fiction, but literary merit shouldn’t be dictated by whether we want to be friends or lovers with those about whom we read.

Frankly, I find “good,” purportedly likable characters rather unbearable. Take May Welland in Edith Wharton’s
The Age of Innocence
. May’s likability is, to be fair, deliberate, a choice Wharton has made so Newland Archer’s passion for Countess Olenska is ever more fraught and bittersweet. Still, May is the kind of woman who always does everything right, everything that is expected of her. She is a perfect society lady. She knows how to keep up appearances. Meanwhile, everyone looks down on May’s unspoken rival and cousin, the Countess Olenska, a woman who dares to defy social conventions, who dares to not tolerate a terrible marriage, who dares to want real passion in her life even if that passion is found with an unsuitable man.

We’re not supposed to like her, but Countess Olenska intrigues me because she is interesting. She stands apart from the blur of social conformity. We’re supposed to like, or at least respect, May for being the proper and sweet innocent she carries herself as; but in Wharton’s skilled hands, we eventually see that May Welland is as human, and therefore as unlikable, as anyone else. This question of likability would be far more tolerable if all writers were as talented as Edith Wharton, but alas.

Far more pernicious than the characters whose likability serves a greater purpose within a narrative are the characters who are flatly likable. It’s a bit silly, but I spend a great deal of time, even now, lamenting the perfection of one Elizabeth Wakefield, one of the two golden twins prominently featured in the popular Sweet Valley High young adult series. Elizabeth is the good girl who always makes the right choices, even when she has to sacrifice her own happiness. She gets good grades. She’s a good daughter, sister, and girlfriend. It’s boring. Elizabeth’s likability is downright loathsome. I am Team Jessica. I prefer Nellie Olesen over Laura Ingalls Wilder.

This matter of likability is largely a futile one. Oftentimes, a likable character is simply designed as such to show that he or she is one who knows how to play by the rules and cares to be seen as playing by the rules. The likable character, like the unlikable character, is generally used to make some greater narrative point.

Often in literary criticism, writers are told that a character isn’t likable, as if a character’s likability is directly proportional to the quality of a novel’s writing. This is particularly true for women in fiction. In literature, as in life, the rules are all too often different for girls. There are many instances in which an unlikable man is billed as an antihero, earning a special term to explain those ways in which he deviates from the norm, the traditionally likable. The list, beginning with Holden Caulfield in
The Catcher in the Rye
, is long. An unlikable man is inscrutably interesting, dark, or tormented, but ultimately compelling, even when he might behave in distasteful ways. This is the only explanation I can come up with for the popularity of, say, the novels of Philip Roth, who is one hell of a writer but who also practically revels in the unlikability of his men, with their neuroses and self-loathing (and, of course, humanity) boldly on display from one page to the next.

When women are unlikable, it becomes a point of obsession in critical conversations by professional and amateur critics alike. Why are these women daring to flaunt convention? Why aren’t they making themselves likable (and therefore acceptable) to polite society? In a
Publishers Weekly
interview with Claire Messud about her novel
The Woman Upstairs
, which features a rather “unlikable” protagonist, Nora, who is bitter, bereft, and downright angry about what her life has become, the interviewer said, “I wouldn’t want to be friends with Nora, would you? Her outlook is almost unbearably grim.” And there we have it. A reader was here to make friends with the characters in a book and she didn’t like what she found.

Messud, for her part, had a sharp response for her interviewer.

For heaven’s sake, what kind of question is that? Would you want to be friends with Humbert Humbert? Would you want to be friends with Mickey Sabbath? Saleem Sinai? Hamlet? Krapp? Oedipus? Oscar Wao? Antigone? Raskolnikov? Any of the characters in
The Corrections
? Any of the characters in
Infinite Jest
? Any of the characters in anything Pynchon has ever written? Or Martin Amis? Or Orhan Pamuk? Or Alice Munro, for that matter? If you’re reading to find friends, you’re in deep trouble. We read to find life, in all its possibilities. The relevant question isn’t “Is this a potential friend for me?” but “Is this character alive?”

Perhaps, then, unlikable characters, the ones who are the most human, are also the ones who are the most alive. Perhaps this intimacy makes us uncomfortable because we don’t dare be so alive.

In
How Fiction Works
, James Wood says,

A great deal of nonsense is written every day about characters in fiction—from the side of those who believe too much in character and from the side of those who believe too little. Those who believe too much have an iron set of prejudices about what characters are: we should get to “know” them; . . . they should “grow” and “develop”; and they should be nice. So they should be pretty much like us.

Wood is correct, in part, but the ongoing question of character likability leaves the impression that what we’re looking for in fiction is an ideal world where people behave in ideal ways. The question suggests that characters should be reflections not of us, but of our better selves.

Wood also says, “There is nothing harder than the creation of fictional character.” I can attest to this difficulty, though with perhaps less hyperbole. I have, indeed, found several other tasks harder over the years. Regardless, characters are hard to create because we need to develop people who are interesting enough to hold a reader’s attention. We need to ensure that they are some measure of credible. We need to make them distinct from ourselves (and, in the best of all words, from those in our lives, unless of course there is a need to settle scores). Somehow they need to be well developed enough to carry a plot, or carry a narrative without a plot, or endure the tribulations we writers tend to throw at them with alacrity. It’s no wonder so many characters are unlikable, given what they have to put up with.

It is a seductive position writers put the reader in when they create an interesting, unlikable character—they make the reader complicit, in ways that are both uncomfortable and intriguing.

If people with messy lives are the point of certain narratives, if unlikable women are the point of certain narratives, novels like
Battleborn
,
Treasure Island!!!
,
Dare Me
,
Magnificence
, and many others exhibit a delightful excess of purpose, with stories filled with women who are deemed unlikable because they make so-called bad choices, describe the world exactly as they see it, and are, ultimately, honest and breathtakingly alive.

These novels depict women who are clearly not participating in their narratives to make friends and whose characters are the better for it. Freed from the constraints of likability, they are able to exist on and beyond the page as fully realized, interesting, and realistic characters. Perhaps the saying “the truth hurts” is what lies at the heart of worrying over likability or the lack thereof—how much of the truth we’re willing to subject ourselves to, how much we are willing to hurt, when we immerse ourselves in the safety of a fictional world.

Sara Levine’s
Treasure Island!!!
features a narrator who is unlikable in curious ways. She is utterly self-obsessed, acts without considering consequences, and always makes choices that will benefit herself over others. She is intensely preoccupied with the book
Treasure Island
and sets out to live her life by the book’s core values: BOLDNESS, RESOLUTION, INDEPENDENCE, and HORN-BLOWING. As the narrator careens from one self-created disaster to another, she is unrepentant. There is no redemption or lesson learned from misdeeds. There is no apology or moral to the story, and that makes an already incisive and intelligent novel even more compelling.

When you think about it, these core values the narrator in
Treasure Island!!!
seeks to live by—BOLDNESS, RESOLUTION, INDEPENDENCE, and HORN-BLOWING—are characteristics that define how supposedly unlikable women lead their fictional lives.

In Pamela Ribon’s
You Take It from Here
, a woman, Smidge, is dying of lung cancer and wants her best friend, Danielle, to essentially finish the job of raising her daughter and being her husband’s companion in grief. The book’s premise is an interesting one, but what really stands apart is how deeply unlikable Smidge is. She is the kind of person who, it might seem, shouldn’t have any friends—bossy, intense, controlling, unrepentant, and manipulative. And yet. She has a best friend, a daughter, a husband, and a community of people who will deeply mourn her when she is gone. Ribon’s steadfastness in this character’s lack of likability is admirable. She never panders by making Smidge somehow have some kind of epiphany of character simply because she is dying. Ribon is unwavering in what she shows us of Smidge, and the novel is the better for it.

A customer review of
You Take It from Here
on Amazon.com from Danae Savitri states, “I never warmed up to Smidge as a character, thought she suffered from borderline personality disorder, common among people who are charismatic narcissistics, who alternately bully, manipulate, and charm others around them.” Instead of judging the book, she calls into question a woman’s likability. Again, there is an armchair diagnosis of mental disease. Pathologizing the unlikable in fictional characters is an almost Pavlovian response.

Dare Me
, by Megan Abbott, is a book about high school cheerleaders, but it is nothing like what you might expect. Populated by women who act with boldness, resolve, independence, and a prioritizing of the self, these mighty principles from
Treasure Island!!!
,
Dare Me
is both engaging and terrifying because it reveals the fraught intimacy between girls. It’s a novel about bodies and striving for perfection and ambition and desire so naked, so palpable, you cannot help but want the deeply flawed women in the book to get what they want, no matter how terribly they go about getting it. The young women at the center of the novel, Beth and Addy, are friends as much as they are enemies. They betray each other and they betray themselves. They commit wrongs, and still they are each other’s gravitational center. On the phone, after a drunken night, Beth asks Addy if she remembers