One wonders if Publishers Weekly contributor Annasue McCleave Wilson wishes she could get a do-over. In a much-discussed April 29 interview for the periodical with novelist Claire Messud, Wilson posited that she wouldn’t be friends with Nora, the narrator of Messud's latest book The Woman Upstairs. “Her outlook is almost unbearably grim.” That question, and Messud’s understandably testy answer (“If you’re reading to find friends, you’re in deep trouble. We read to find life, in all its possibilities”), ignited several new rounds in the ongoing debate about whether characters—especially female characters—need to be likable.
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