Protagonists to love and hate

There has long been the question of how much a character’s likability matters in regard to how we feel about a novel.

The best-known literary dust-up on the topic was a Publishers Weekly conversation in which Claire Messud, author of 2013’s “The Woman Upstairs,” responded with horror to her interviewer’s statement that she “wouldn’t want to be friends” with the novel’s main character, Nora.

“For heaven’s sake, what kind of question is that?” Messud replied. “Would you want to be friends with Humbert Humbert? Would you want to be friends with Mickey Sabbath? Saleem Sinai? Hamlet? Krapp? Oedipus? … Any of the characters in anything Pynchon has ever written? Or Martin Amis? Or Orhan Pamuk? Or Alice Munro, for that matter? If you’re reading to find friends, you’re in deep trouble.”

In 2014, Edan Lepucki, writing in online literary magazine the Millions, admitted to “a taste for the quote-unquote unlikeable set: Eva Khatchadourian from (Lionel) Shriver’s ‘We Need to Talk About Kevin’; Sheba and Barbara from Zoe Heller’s ‘Notes on a Scandal’; Undine Spragg from Edith Wharton’s ‘Custom of the Country.’ I love that they’re barbed, delusional, judgmental, thorny, damaged, and/or vulnerable.”

I hereby admit I’m thrilled when I fall in love with a novel’s protagonist. I recently listened to “How Not To Drown in a Glass of Water” by Angie Cruz, narrated by the remarkable Rossmery Almonte, and fell head-over-heels with the protagonist, 56-yearold Cara Romero.

Cara has fled an abusive husband in the Dominican Republic with her infant son and $10 in her pocket. She lives in the rapidly gentrifying Washington Heights neighborhood of New York, has recently been fired from her factory job of 25 years, and is threatened with eviction from her rent-controlled apartment. The novel, all in Cara’s voice, takes the form of 12 sessions with an employment assistance program counselor to determine if she’s eligible for continued unemployment benefits.

Cara pours out her story and her heart to the never-heard interviewer, describing her life in the tight-knit community she has formed in her apartment building. Despite the fact that her son has abandoned her, she is uber-mother to her family and friends in the building — a cook, caregiver, friend and confidante.

Cara is warm, resilient, revealing and unintentionally funny. Remarkably, over the course of the novel, she arrives at believable self-realization, understanding that she is not a saint and accepting the role she has played in some of her misfortunes. By the book’s end, I wanted to sit at Cara’s kitchen table and eat her famous pastillas (made without raisins because she hates them).

Conversely, I couldn’t stand the central character in Stacey D’Erasmo’s “The Complicities.” D’Erasmo (“The Sky Below,” “A Seahorse Year,” “Tea”) is a talented writer. Suzanne, the central character in “The Complicities,” has left her husband, a character based on financier Bernie Madoff, who at the novel’s start has gone to jail for his financial misdeeds. Suzanne flees to a nondescript Cape Cod community to start a new life. She feels no complicity in her husband’s crime, to which she has been blindly oblivious, despite the fact that her husband contends he revealed to her the nature of his misdeeds. She was too busy decorating houses, raising their son and managing logistics for her family’s extensive travel.

Once resettled, Suzanne becomes, according to her own assessment, a gifted body worker after taking a brief online course. She also becomes obsessed with the plight of an ailing whale beached on her community’s shore, volunteering with the rescue effort, caring much more about the plight of the world’s marine mammals than the people whose lives her former husband ruined. In short, a sanctimonious bitch.

I’m certain D’Erasmo was intentional in her depiction of Suzanne. “The Complicities” is a multilayered book about guilt, restitution, redemption and, mostly, about wounded people. But despite these compelling larger themes, I just couldn’t get past Suzanne.

I hereby admit I’m thrilled when I fall in love with a novel’s protagonist. I recently listened to “How Not To Drown in a Glass of Water” by Angie Cruz, narrated by the remarkable Rossmery Almonte, and fell head-over-heels with the protagonist, 56-year-old Cara Romero.