[R]eaders want to be engaged even more than they want to be seduced. When purely affectionate and approving, a reader’s relationship to a character is flat. When positive feelings mix with censure and consternation, the relationship is dynamic. In fact, authorial elicitation of the reader’s frantic if impotent warning, “Oh, no, don’t do that!” is a powerful literary tool, for dismay generates energy and intensifiies engagement. In [We Need to Talk About]Kevin, I made Eva’s husband Franklin deliberately exasperating—see-no-evil, he refuses to recognize his son’s growing malice—because this “What a dupe! Wake up, buddy!” reaction is involving and oddly enjoyable.
[…] Were Eva Khatchadourian a devoted mother who adored her son from birth, there would be no book—and Lynne Ramsay would never have released her excellent adaptation of the novel this week as a feature film. Were Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina both faithful wives, we would never know their names.
Good stories require mistakes. If you want to read about unimpeachable characters, order the annual report from Oxfam. If you want to read about difficult, complicated, maddening characters who remind you of people you know—who remind you, if you’re honest, of yourself—read Shakespeare. Read Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Flaubert. Read Wilde, Updike, Roth, Yates, Wolfe, Woodward, McEwan, Hornby, Hollinghurst and Shriver.
— Author Lionel Shriver in defense of unlikable characters (via Slate).It is sometimes said that detective stories are read by respectable law-abiding citizens in order to gratify in phantasy the violent or murderous wishes they dare not, or are ashamed to, translate into action. This may be true for the reader of thrillers (which I rarely enjoy), but it is quite false for the reader of detective stories. On the contrary, the magical satisfaction the latter provide (which makes them escape literature not works of art) is the illusion of being dissociated from the murderer.
The magic formula is an innocence which is discovered to contain guilt; then a suspicion of being the guilty one; and finally a real innocence from which the guilty other has been expelled, a cure effected, not by me or my neighbors, but by the miraculous intervention of a genius from outside who removes guilt by giving knowledge of guilt. (The detective story subscribes, in fact, to the Socratic daydream: “Sin is ignorance.”)
— W.H. Auden, “The Guilty Vicarage: Notes on the Detective Story,” Harper’s Magazine, 1948.
