Good People Don’t Make Good Characters
By Heart is a series in which authors share and discuss their all-time favorite passages in literature. See entries from Karl Ove Knausgaard, Jonathan Franzen, Amy Tan, Khaled Hosseini, and more.
The debate about whether fictional characters should be sympathetic tends to focus on external pressures—the commercial considerations of “likability” and “relatability,” the fear that readers won’t stick with protagonists they can’t identify with or root for. But Tony Tulathimutte, the author of Private Citizens, points out something less often acknowledged: Writers themselves are expected to play the part of sympathetic, super-perceptive, even heroic human beings. And it’s easier to fulfill that requirement when you’re writing about “good” people.
In his essay for this series, Tulathimutte admits that, as a younger writer, he tried to telegraph his own nobility through generously imagined characters. But Philip Roth’s American Trilogy taught him to distrust the notion that novelists know more, or feel more, or are better people, than anyone else. Taking cues from Roth, Tulathimutte’s learned to write better fiction by fleshing out his characters’ ugly, reprehensible sides—disclosing (and problematizing) his own personal shortcomings in the process.
follows fourAs the characters haplessly pursue various fulfillments—sex, professional dignity, political purpose, venture capital—Tulathimutte’s manic, unsparing, and entertaining narrations reveal the psychic turmoil below each outwardly tranquil surface.
