Why we love weird little freaks

All likeable narrators are alike; each unlikeable narrator is unlikeable in its own way. 

​I think Tolstoy said that? In any event, it’s a truth that is forgotten in a lot of contemporary North American fiction. I believe the rest of the world embraces nasty narrators and weirdo characters, but over the last twenty years there has been a push for “likeable characters” that has coincided with a belief that “depiction is endorsement.” This has led to a lot of characters that are frankly boring. They might be “nice” and “good” but they’re dull. And in literature being boring is the greatest sin of all.
 
If we have access to a character’s thoughts, they should be thoughts worth showing. Give us your obsessive weirdos, pompous buffoons, self-hating POS, or foolish little freaks. If someone says a character isn’t likeable enough, ignore them. 
 
The term “likeable” is confused from the start anyway. The people who advocate for likeable characters tend to mean that a character should be a Good Person or someone they’d want to befriend in real life. I’d argue a better way to think about likability is that you should enjoy spending time in said character’s thoughts. I probably wouldn’t want to be close friends with any of Thomas Bernhard’s miserable misanthropic narrators  or Vladimir Nabokov’s narcissists. But I sure like listening to them rant. 
 
In 2013, there was controversy after an interviewer complained to Claire Messed that that they “wouldn’t want to be friends with Nora, would you?” (Nora being the main character of The Woman Upstairs.) Messud was taken aback and asked the interviewer if they’d want to be friends with Saleem Sinai, Hamlet, Antigone, or countless other memorable characters from literary history: “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?’” A character who is somehow at odds with society feels more alive than one who is fitting in swimmingly. Their viewpoint is unique because it is off-kilter from everyone else’s.
 
A narrator doesn’t have to be a bad person to be interesting, although many excellent narrators are vile, villains, or otherwise nasty people. But they probably should indulge their obsessions, delusions, and bizarre thoughts in the way that most of us try to avoid in real life. What’s the point of literature—where access to another person’s consciousness is a key strength of the form—if a characters’ interior thoughts mirror their curated public ones? Characters can’t play it safe on the page. A prime pleasure of literature is watching characters divulge their squirm-inducing, innermost secrets to you, the reader.
 
It seems possible that one reason contemporary American literature has seen a decrease in the weirdness, freakiness, and nastiness of characters is the rise of “autofiction.” If an author is writing about themselves, they may be less likely to reveal their hidden self to the world. This is the exact wrong tactic IMHO. If a writer uses autofiction to prove that they, via a fictional stand-in, are a good and honest person whose flaws can only ever be sympathetic and whose mistakes easily excused, well, that fiction will likely be pretty boring. 
 
I agree with Messud that you shouldn’t look to literature for friends. Yet it is also true that even your friends are freaks, losers, and jerks in various ways. Aren’t we all little weirdos at heart? Fiction is exactly the place to expose those hidden parts. I’ve made a resolution to show the reader my character’s real interiors. Warts most of all.