On Difficult Heroines, or, Why We Read (Novels)

This summer, I was asked to give a book talk in Chatham, Massachusetts, hosted by the bookstore Where the Sidewalk Ends, which is owned and run by a lovely mother and daughter, Joanne and Caitlin Doggart. What follows is a version of that talk—a hodge podge of ideas I’ve been mulling in recent months. I’ve been thinking a lot about difficult heroines, and I decided to talk about them, and on a somehow—I hope—related note, the question of why we read.

My first novel, Perfect Reader, explored both; Flora Dempsey, my central character, is perhaps not easy to love. I hesitate to describe her any more than I’ve already tried to do by letting her live in the novel, as whenever I hear myself describing Flora I picture her rolling her eyes and saying something like, please spare me your patronizing authorial crap. Upon the sudden death of her father, Flora finds herself his literary executor, and in this role, in charge of an unfinished manuscript of poems he has written. She is both flattered and burdened by the designation (ambivalence her primary mode of being), and spends much of her time avoiding reading her father’s work. She wonders why her father has chosen her. She calls herself the literary executioner. She wrestles with the question—one her academic father wrote on during his life—of what a reader owed a text. How should a reader, a blatantly imperfect reader, with her own complicated relationship to the material and its author, read a work?

I first fell in love with difficult heroines when, in a high school English class called Great Novels, I read Jane Austen’s Emma. Emma is of course spoiled and self-centered and meddling. And, I thought, totally enchanting. At the end of the book Mr. Knightley declares her to be “faultless in spite of all her faults”; I found this not only the world’s most perfect praise, I also concurred wildly. When I got to class on the appointed day of our discussion, I was then shocked to hear that my classmates found her spoiled, self-centered, meddling, and not at all enchanting. She could not, it seemed, be the first three, and the last, all at once. More, they seemed not to have liked the book as a result—they didn’t like Emma, they couldn’t relate to Emma, and so they felt uninvested in the novel, her story.

I reacted to this news that I saw things so differently as any angst-fancying teen might: with a sense of disappointment, and alienation. But also interest. It was interesting to me that these readers read that way. That they wanted to identify with a character, and that they found it easier to identify with a more obviously likeable character. Would they accept difficulty in a hero more easily than they would in a heroine? (How else to explain the career of Philip Roth, whom I adore, but one hardly wants to identify too deeply with, say, Alexander Portnoy?) Were they all so impeccable themselves, these readers—as to identify with spirited, and prejudiced but always-decent Lizzie Bennett, but not the more flawed and complicated Emma Woodhouse? Were these the kind of people, who when asked to describe their worst qualities, announced themselves to be “perfectionists” or “too giving”? And what did it say about me that as a reader I preferred the less likeable character? Was I simply more flawed?

A writer should never respond to her reviewers. Impossible not to sound defensive. And yet. Several of the early customer reviews of my novel on Amazon dealt with the problem of Flora as a difficult heroine, or in the words of one reader, “an overgrown baby,” a trait that interfered with their enjoyment of the novel. Again, my interest was piqued. Was Flora so unlikeable as to be unsympathetic? Could a character be an unlikeable overgrown baby and still elicit sympathy? From where, exactly, did sympathy emerge?

True, reading fiction is often confusing. Do I dislike the character, or the author, or both? Reading Ian McEwan's latest novel, Solar, I caught myself wondering, who is the smug one here, McEwan, or his character, Michael Beard? (I've long loved McEwan, and chose to conclude it was the latter, but some reviewers decided the other way.)

In my novel, I stole an idea from a brilliant Columbia professor, Edward Tayler. His notion is that there are two types of readers in the world: the Reader as Narcissus, who goes to the page looking for his own reflection, and the Reader as Understander, who goes to see what the writer is up to, what the words themselves are doing. Add to this binary (why not?) the Reader as Life Coach, who when confronted with a difficult heroine (or maybe even hero) feels an irrepressible instinct to reform, and to scold. The Reader as Life Coach does not brook ambivalence; this reader stumps for mental health, and impeccable-ness. It's as if there's something unsettling, hell, something downright un-American about unlikeable heroines—they don't inspire or encourage or buck up.

But there is pleasure in bad behavior, isn't there? Watching thrillers, we relish the stomach coiling feeling of wishing disaster averted: Don't Go In There. With a difficult heroine, there is a corollary pain/pleasure: For God's Sake, Don't Do That. Throughout The House of Mirth, much of the agonizing joy comes from wishing the impossible upon Lily Bart—beautiful, vivid, and difficult: a life of decadent dullness. We know the alternative will be catastrophic. Buck up, Lily! Just marry the rich bore! But we don't really wish it—such an urge is nothing if not ruinous to the plot, it nullifies the very book. Lily can no more buck up than Janet Leigh can drive past the Bates Motel, and as many a heroine seeking liberation from her fate, she seals it instead, punished for wanting more.

The character of Flora started sharply, and sharpened with subsequent drafts. I did not set out to make her appealing or unappealing, but human and flawed and in a constant struggle with her least generous self. I allowed her to act in ways I might not allow myself to act and I tried to understand why she had come to act thus. At one point in the writing process my agent suggested I move the third person narration closer to her point-of-view, cutting “she thoughts” or “she wondered” and instead slipping into her perspective. In this way, as in first person narration, a reader suddenly finds herself inside a character’s mind, though unlike the first person the reader also has moments of distance, of watching the character at work. But being close to Flora, or merely observing her—proximity or distance or some combination of the two—is clearly not enough to earn a reader's sympathy.

As a reader, I tend to feel sympathy for a character, however difficult, so long as the author does. Austen is not overly forgiving of Emma, nor is she disdainful of her. Rather, she lets her do her worst and be punished and rewarded. It is in the novels where I feel a writer’s contempt for his or her characters where my sympathy is thwarted. I can admire these novels, but they leave me cold. If the writer seems not to enjoy spending time with his or her creations, why should I? When a writer shows compassion, or sympathy, I tend to as well.

In “The Death of Ivan Ilyich,” Tolstoy writes that upon learning the news of a colleague’s death: “Apart from the reflections this death called up in each of them about the transfers and possible changes at work that might result from it, the very fact of the death of a close acquaintance called up in all those who heard of it, as always, a feeling of joy that it was he who was dead and not I” (Pevear & Volokhonsky, 40).

In this passage, dark and hilarious in its under-statedness, the blatantly unsympathetic response of the characters is blunted by the writer’s matter-of-factness and absence of judgment. The crucial phrase, “as always,” shows, if not compassion, then at least the certainty that such behavior is human and universal. And the graceful sliding into the first person at the end of the sentence, “that it was he who was dead and not I,” implicates the reader, too. Tolstoy tells us, not unkindly, that we would behave no differently or better were we in their place. As a writer, he does not condemn the behavior, so as a reader, I don’t either. And more, I begin to question myself. Is that true? Would I, too, feel joy? This is why I read, to meet characters I might not want to be, and through them to ask larger questions of myself, and to see the world in a more complicated, darker light. Somewhere between Narcissus and Understander, maybe, but nowhere near—I hope—the Life Coach.