Here, Here! The whole culture is drowning in the sewage of the “likeable.”

Imagine that – people who don’t want to pay money to spend hours with thoroughly unpleasant characters who have no redeeming virtues. What’s the world coming to?

Interest in characters often takes the place of an interest in a novel’s structure, style, and word choice. Emphasis on characters, and also on plot, is an easy out when a reviewer is asked to sum up a book in 600 words. Reviewers in printed publications, as well as others, go this route.

It’s when a book doesn’t have likeable characters that some reviewers flail around trying to find something to say. However, since the writers most often reviewed are presenting ‘historical’ fiction, or some type of genre work (YA, detective, and so forth), this doesn’t cause the truly lazy reviewer much of a problem. Because that reviewer isn’t going to pick up J. Robert Lennon or Gabriel Josipovici, whose books will make demands that classify them as experimental.

My book, Verbatim: A Novel, comes out this month from Enfield & Wizenty. It takes place in a legislature in a fictional Canadian province. It’s told in lists of members, debates in dual-column format, and letters. No narrative passages, no lyrical language. The ‘characters’ are politicians and bureaucrats, and there isn’t a protagonist: maybe they’re all antagonists. But there can be an excitement (hopefully found in this book) in reading about ideas, or taking in how Canadians govern themselves, that can be enough. You don’t have to have characters or a plot. There are many other elements to a novel or short story.

In a screenwriting workshop, the instructor said that “unlikable” is a common criticism studio execs (who are known to be as lazy as some reviewers) use to describe a character, when what they really mean is they don’t care about the character. It’s interesting to note that the more compelling a character is in fiction, the less I would actually like to meet him or her in real life. That may be why I reread The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz every few years.

Likeable my a**, if I like the story then I will like the book.

My only comment would be “no comment.”