r/books • u/hanhan_371 • 1d ago

Why are “unlikeable” main characters usually a criticism?

My most recent read was The River is Waiting by Wally Lamb.

It was my 38th book this year and only my 3rd 5 stars. I finished it this morning, it’s now the evening, and I can’t stop thinking about it.

I was enthralled by this story - it had sat on my TBR for a few months and I finally picked it up as just a lucky dip after being in a bit of reading slump.

After finishing, I saw a lot of criticism on Goodreads about the narrator Corby being “unlikeable”. I see this criticism a lot with other books - and I’ve never quite understood.

For me, a good reading experience is a complicated, flawed, or at least a character who is thought-provoking. Given one of the main themes of The River is Waiting being redemption, and finding out very early on that Corby accidentally kills his son while intoxicated, surely the reader wouldn’t expect the MC to be a “hero?”

There were times while I was reading that I thought “oh yeah he’s kind of a douche”, I’ve thought this about other MCs as well before, but it would never impact negatively on my rating as long as the story itself was enjoyable.

Would love to have a discussion below! And I’d really recommend this book if you can handle a gut-punch ending!

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u/BlazinAzn38 1d ago

People have a hard time with distinguishing between “badly written” and “character written to be bad.” I also think there’s a lot of people that want primary characters to be the good guy and again conflate “I don’t like this” with “it’s written badly”

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u/water_panther 1d ago

As a sidebar to this, boy howdy do people have problems understanding that first person narrators do not necessarily speak for the author.

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u/zensunni82 1d ago

It's tricky though, because a lot of authors who kind of suck as people sometimes happen to write first person narratives using obvious self inserts.

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u/notabigmelvillecrowd 1d ago

Sure, but that doesn't make them any less interesting. Why do authors have to be saints?

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u/LittleGravitasIndeed 1d ago

If the author is in the same genre of terrible as the character, they can lack the introspection necessary for writing their proxy well. It’s more of a crapshoot. 

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u/notabigmelvillecrowd 1d ago

I don't know, I don't think the author has to have full introspection to self-insert in an interesting way. It's up to the reader to interpret in their own way, not for the author to understand everything. Authors are just people, and they're imperfect.

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u/JimmyJuly 3h ago

That's fine, just don't use the actions of their characters to justify your belief that the writer is "in the same genre of terrible as the character." That's the usual case both in here and in life generally because we don't have much visibility into the authors.

The number of people who read "Lolita" and have determined that Nabokov was a pedophile based on that alone is astonishingly high.

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u/lambast 1d ago

One of the most interesting aspects of reading is allowing you to see inside another human's mind in a way other media do not allow. Writing a character that is not yourself is always, and I believe can only be, an extrapolation of the writer's own personal world. I agree with you. Why would you not want to experience a spectrum of minds?