Monstrous men are more than welcome in serious fiction, but create an unlikeable female character and you’re in for trouble
When I was writing my novel Animals I knew I was creating female characters who were going against the grain. Drinking. Thinking. Wandering round cities at ungodly hours. Having philosophical crises. You know, like male characters do in what are more generally catalogued as tales of “the human condition”?
There have been eloquent points made over the last couple of years about the “likeability” of female characters – notably by Roxane Gay and Claire Messud. In an interview with Publishers Weekly, novelist Messud responded spectacularly to a question about whether she’d want to be friends with her latest narrator Nora, given that Nora’s outlook was “unbearably grim”. Messud said: “For heaven’s sake, what kind of question is that? Would you want to be friends with Humbert Humbert?” before reeling off a list of classic male anti-heroes and concluding: “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?’”
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There have been eloquent points made over the last couple of years about the “likeability” of female characters – notably by Roxane Gay and Claire Messud. In an interview with Publishers Weekly, novelist Messud responded spectacularly to a question about whether she’d want to be friends with her latest narrator Nora, given that Nora’s outlook was “unbearably grim”. Messud said: “For heaven’s sake, what kind of question is that? Would you want to be friends with Humbert Humbert?” before reeling off a list of classic male anti-heroes and concluding: “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?’”
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