The Morning Reading: Desire and Character

from the February 13 and 20 2012 issue of The New Yorker:

Jonathan Franzen,"A Rooting Interest: Edith Wharton and the problem of sympathy"

excerpt:

"By sympathy in novels need not be simply a matter of the reader's direct identification with a fictional character. It can also be driven by, say, my admiration of a characters who is long on virtues I am short on (the moral courage of Atticus Finch, the limpid goodness of Alyosha Karamazov), or, most interestingly, by my wish to be a character who is unlike me in ways I don't admire or even like. One of my great perplexities of fiction - is that we experience sympathy so readily for characters we wouldn't like in real life. Becky Sharp may be a soulless social climber, Tom Ripley may be a sociopath, the Jackal may want to assassinate the French President, Mickey Sabbath may be a disgustingly self-involved old goat, and Raskolnikov may want to get away with murder, but I find myself rooting for each of them. This is sometimes, no doubt, a function of the lure of the forbidden, the guilty pleasure of imagining what it would be like to be unburdened by scruples. In every case, though, the alchemical agent by which fiction transmutes my secret envy or my ordinary dislike of "bad" people into sympathy is desire. Apparently, all a novelist has to do is give a character a powerful desire (to rise socially, to get away with murder) and I, as a reader, become helpless not to make that desire my own."

To read the rest, check out the magazine on the newsstand (do they still exist?), in the library or perhaps in your mailbox.

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