Is Caring the True Test?

Is it a mark of a good story that your readers care about your main character, that they are deeply concerned about what happens to him?Certainly it’s not the only test, but usually that kind of liking—call it empathy to make it sound more serious—is what sustains a reader through a story. I know that finding a character whose skin I can inhabit with pleasure is important to me.Recently, though, I read an essay by Greg Mortimer in Off the Shelf. His title was “Why Likeable Characters are Beside the Point,” and the book he chose to discuss was Claire Messud’s The Woman Upstairs. Mortimer asks, “So is Nora [the central character] unlikable? Sure. She’s also angry and lonely and shoulders the burden of her family’s past. But her humanity is blazing. Her furious self-consciousness—the way she sometimes bathes, almost luxuriously, in her anger—may be unrelatable or repulsive, but it’s impossible to write off her desire to transcend that anger in her quest to live an authentic life.”I happened to have just read The Woman Upstairs when I encountered Mortimer’s essay, and I realized as I read his words that while I was reading I had never once asked whether I liked Nora. I was too immersed in her psyche, too much one with her even to pass judgment. I did pause sometimes to ask myself what was holding me into the story, despite the fact that so little happened. But the answer always came back . . . Nora herself was holding me there.Messud herself has said, “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?’”That sounds as though it settles the question. It’s not necessary for your readers to like your main character for your story to work. It’s only necessary for us to be able to inhabit that character deeply enough to want to share her experience, to believe in this made-up person.And yet . . . I’ll admit I have occasionally put a novel down—even with only a few pages left to read—and never returned to it because I suddenly realized that the ending didn’t matter to me. There was no one on the page I cared enough about for the story’s outcome to matter.On the other hand, Elizabeth Strout’s Pulitzer Prize winning collection of linked short stories, Olive Kitteridge, presents a woman who is exasperating, rude, sometimes even cruel. And yet she compelled me from the first page to the last. I didn’t like Olive Kitteridge, but I was fascinated by her. Why? She was so fully and exquisitely alive.I heard someone say, “Olive Kitteridge is the only book I’ve ever read where the character doesn’t change, but the reader does.” And though I think it could be argued that the character does, indeed, change, certainly the reader may change more profoundly.I waited for years for a new novel from Elizabeth Strout, because I loved her first three so ardently, and when The Burgess Brothers appeared I snatched it up instantly . . . and was disappointed. Not because Elizabeth Strout’s writing had diminished. I’m sure it remained as strong in this book as the others. But I found myself back in that territory I’d visited occasionally with other writers where I didn’t like anybody well enough to care about the outcome. And the Burgess brothers didn’t compel me in a way that could take the place of liking.Where does the line fall between a Nora or an Olive and those characters I’m willing to dismiss from my consciousness without knowing their fate? It’s not the quality of the writing. It’s something else.I suspect what I’m demanding in a character, without ever naming it as I read, is vulnerability. Olive, for all her prickliness, is deeply vulnerable. So is Nora. If there is vulnerability in the Burgess brothers, I didn’t find it.And so I turn to my own characters, to the choices I must make in creating them. How do I capture my readers? Certainly, making my characters likable is the easiest way.But it’s not the only path to reader acceptance. Whether my characters are likable or not, they must give the illusion of being alive. And nothing speaks of life more profoundly than a glimpse of the vulnerability we are all born with.