I Like You, You Like Me, We're a Happy Family

If there's one word I'm sick of hearing in a literary context, it's "likable." Then again, maybe I'm sick of hearing it in any context.

Remember when it was fashionable for political pundits to say that the reason Bush Jr. was elected was because he was more "likable" than his opponents, Al Gore and John Kerry? Or in the last campaign, when Hillary Clinton was accused of the grave charge of not being "likable." It seems a little odd to me that one of the standards for being elected leader of the free world should be "likability," but if that is a measure voters are using, then it's a tendency to be decried, rather than analyzed.

Or, on a much more mundane level, imagine if a friend came up to you and said, "I just wanted to tell you, you're really likable." Would you take that as a compliment? Would you even know how to interpret such a remark? One possible response: "Gee, thanks for telling me that it's possible, even probable, that people like me."

And yet, in literary criticism, it's become accepted, even fashionable, for readers, critics, and editors to routinely charge writers with the crime of creating characters who are "unlikable." Forgive me for thinking that my job as a writer was to create characters with distinct and recognizable traits, characters with lifelike complexity, characters who do and say memorable things. No, it turns out that what writers are really supposed to do is create characters with whom a reader might like to split a salad with at lunch. Or, rather, we're supposed to create characters whom editors in New York imagine that readers in such exotic locales as St. Louis, Chicago, or Seattle might like to split a salad with at lunch.

In the past few months, I've read three novels by Raymond Chandler and The Education of Hyman Kaplan by Leo Rosten, and reread A Passage to India by E. M. Forster. These books all had two qualities in common. First, they were brilliant works of literature that were fun and absorbing to read. Second, they featured oodles of characters who could not be called "likable." Coincidence? I think not.

If I want an agreeable lunch partner, I'll call up one of my friends. If I want to read a great novel, the last thing I'll do at the bookstore is scan the jacket copy as if it were a personal ad in the hopes that the characters might be plausible BFF candidates. In fact, what I'm often looking for is quite the opposite.

In life, I would not want to hang out with Philip Marlowe, Hyman Kaplan, or Miss Quested and Dr. Aziz. They'd probably be too much to take after a short while. But in literature, I get the chance to spend time in their company for as long or as little as I wish and whenever I wish, without the burdens of courtesy, comparing schedules, remembering birthdays, etc. Furthermore, the authors who've created these characters have done me the favor of excluding the un-interesting parts of their lives and saving all the interesting stuff for the page. And I'd rather have unlikable and interesting than likable and boring.

I guess what it comes down to is that I read to expand my knowledge of the universe, not to confirm what I already know. As I open each new book I read, my hope is that I will get to observe people and places and storylines that I may not come across in my daily routine. If all I wanted were the latter, I could always go on Facebook.