Turns out the key to making an unlikable character engaging is to have something happen in the story: "Funny Little Snake" by Tessa Hadley

I was reminded recently while watching the film Uncut Gems how hard it is to create a story with an unlikable main character and still draw the audience into the spell of the narrative. Watching the movie was Mrs. Heretic's choice, not mine, and after the first 45 minutes, when I got up to go to the bathroom, I gave very serious thought to just continuing on to the parking lot and texting Mrs. Heretic that I went outside to read, because I hated the movie that much.

I'm glad I went back in. There was a very smart scene soon after I got back that involved a broken security door, and it ratcheted up the tension a lot, where it stayed. I left still not thinking it was a very good movie, because it's supposed to be a suspense movie, but the main character, played by Adam Sandler, is such a terrible person, it's hard to care if anything bad happens to him. This isn't a person who is flawed but still human and empathetic. He has multiple opportunities in the movie to show a redeeming quality, and he fails every test.

The next day, though, I woke up thinking that maybe it wasn't such a bad movie, because it resisted the impulse to show him as flawed but still likable. It also resisted the audience's natural desire to want to make him empathetic, or to root for a fairy tale ending he didn't deserve.

"Funny Little Snake" and "Omakase"

The first entry in the 2019 O.Henry Prize Anthology, "Funny Little Snake," has a lot of unlikable characters in it. There might not be one in it who is easy to like. The main character, Valerie, is at least someone easy to relate to, because when her disengaged, quiet, dull stepdaughter Robyn comes to visit, all Valerie wants is for the child to go back to her mother so Valerie can be alone again. For the first third of the story, I only wanted what Valerie wanted, which was to get rid of the girl and go back to life as it was. I breathed a sigh of relief along with her when Valerie finally dropped her off.

"Funny Little Snake" reminded me in many ways of the story "Omakase," which was in both the 2019 Best American Short Stories collection and in the O.Henry, making it one of a small handful of stories that have done both. I didn't really like "Omakase" much, but it's easy to see parallels between "Omakase" and "Snake." Both have women being taken advantage of by men who spout liberal principles but who at heart want a woman to just shut up and get with the program. Both have women slowly coming to the realization that they shouldn't be with these men much longer, although neither has gone beyond just getting the first real inklings of that epiphany by the end.

So why do I love "Funny Little Snake" but feel ambivalent toward "Omakase"? Because Omakase is more or less a debate going on in a woman's head while she goes through the privileged act of eating sushi. There's no challenge in her way, other than the very small challenge of facing micro-aggressions during dinner. There are no stakes. She can have the realization she needs to have now, or she can have it in a few weeks, or in a year, or she can learn to live with it and never really leave her stupid man. Whatever.

Valerie, though, faces an unexpected challenge that tests her humanity, and she has very little time to reflect on it. There are sudden and terrible stakes, and just as Valerie must go suddenly from selfish to selfless, we also must suddenly move from indifference to her to caring deeply about her choices.

The four terrible people in "Snake"

There are six characters in "Funny Little Snake." One is the child, Robyn, who is too young and has too sad a childhood to be held responsible for her character. Another is Valerie's mother, who seems unlikable, but isn't on stage enough to make a real judgment. The other four characters are all bad people, although to varying degrees.

There's Gil, Valerie's fifty-year-old husband (she's twenty-four). He's a narcissistic history professor who had to leave one college because he imagined everyone was out to get him and go to another, where he's again sure the game is rigged. He insists on bringing Robyn, his daughter from his first marriage, out to his house up north for a week, but then he leaves Robyn to his new wife while he goes to his office to work on his book. He doesn't seem to like his daughter, and probably only brought her up for the week to make a point to his ex-wife, whom he calls all manner of names, mostly ones with "whore" in them. He charmed Valerie through his intelligence and frumpy sophistication, but now that she is married to him, he shows occasional flashes of a bad temper. His ex-wife says he used to beat her, but she's such a piece of work, we're not sure she's right about that.

The ex-wife is Marise, an aging hippie who seems to drift from man to man--Gil isn't wrong about that. She neglects her daughter, Robyn, and allows her live-in boyfriend du jour to be a letch. She's also a narcissist, and she provides almost no discernible parenting to Robyn. She's more like a barely cognizant babysitter, doing the minimum with her charge to she can get back to shagging the boy she brought over.

The boyfriend is Jamie. He doesn't say much. He's in a band, he's much younger than Marise, and he gazes with unsettling sexual frankness at Valerie. He's obviously just hanging out with Marise and living at her place, taking advantage of her need to have someone like him around and having a good time for the nonce. He smokes pot, which isn't necessarily a big deal, except Robyn is in the house, and the smell has gotten into her clothes. Most unsettlingly, Valerie finds him in Robyn's bedroom in only his underwear. He may not be abusing the girl, but he's definitely not a good influence.

And then there's Valerie herself. She's the least awful of the four, but she's not a great person at the start of the story, either. She isn't really happy in her marriage, but she figures putting up with Gil is "part of the price she paid for having been singled out by the professor among the girls in the faculty office at King's College London." In other words, she cashed in on her beauty while she was young to find someone who could take care of her, and if she's not in love, that's just part of the deal. So she keeps her opinions to herself, and she rationalizes away the professor's bad behavior: "...important men had to be selfish to get ahead. She understood that--she wouldn't have wanted a softer man who wasn't respected." She is vaguely impressed by his intellect, but not intellectually curious herself, drifting off to thoughts about the drapes when he is talking about the English Revolution.

Her central vice is self-centerdness. Valerie watches Robyn for Gil out of a sense of duty, but she doesn't like the child. She tries to make Robyn like her, but "the truth was that she couldn't wait for Robyn to go home. She longed to be free of that dogged unresponsive little figure following her everywhere around the house." The universe is trying to send her a sign in the form of the girl to get out of her own solipsistic fog, but Valerie is resisting it, "gasping for her solitude like a lungful of clean air."

Stakes 

While Valerie starts off as a passive character, events don't allow her to stay that way. First, Gil asks her to take Robyn back to Marise in London, rather than Gil driving the girl down. Once there, Valerie gets a peek into Robyn's life, and it's horrifying. Marise is half insane. She doesn't feed Robyn beyond dry cornflakes or crackers. She doesn't take care of Robyn's hygiene or keep her clothes clean. The girl doesn't have a bed, and she doesn't know how to dress herself. Suddenly, it becomes clear why the girl seemed so unresponsive during the week she was with Valerie, why she seemed "hardly to know the names of things."

Still, it isn't really Valerie's place to intervene. She can legitimately claim that. She's the stepmother. This isn't her fight. She did a good job for a week of taking care of child not her own, and now she's entitled to go back to her life.

But it snows, and the next morning, she can't go back home. She can't stand to talk to her mother whose house she spent the night at, so she wanders about. Valerie finds herself liking the "strangeness" of the snow and the "disruption it caused." By keeping her in London one day, it's about to cause the biggest disruption of her life, because Valerie decides to go back to the house where Robyn lives. She tells herself she "didn't even know why she came back," except maybe to take a second chance at acting cooler in front of Marise. That might have been the truth, or it might have been what she told herself in order to be brave enough to do what she sensed she ought to do, but either way, when the time to act arrives, she is ready.

Robyn is looking out her window, and sees Valerie coming. For the first time, the girl shows a clear preference for something. "In the whole week of her visit, she hadn't reacted so forcefully to anything." She nearly falls out the window with excitement, and when Valerie comes in the open door and finds Robyn, the girl asks Valerie to take her back home with her. Valerie refuses, which leads to the girl kicking and crying--again, the first time the girl is showing her own wants. Valerie finds she "likes Robyn better with her face screwed into an ugly fury, kicking out with her feet."

Robyn undergoes a sudden epiphany that leads to immediate action. She looks "around with a new purposefulness, assessing quickly. 'Where's your coat? Do you need the bathroom?'"

Marise wakes up from her nap to stop Robyn from leaving, evoking a confrontation during which Valerie accuses Marise of negligent parenting. But Valerie can't just take the girl, so she leaves, defeated.

I won't give the end away. There's a coda. But Valerie's action in the coda is already decided by her epiphany in the scene before. In two minutes, she has become a mother.

This one action makes her suddenly aware of another she may one day need to take--that of leaving Gil. Much like wanting one thing awoke a whole flood of bottled-up desire in Robyn, so wanting one thing has allowed Valerie to allow herself to want other things for herself.

Needing to rise to the occasion made Valerie better, and it also made the story better

To return to "Omakase" for a moment, its protagonist ends up in a similar place to where Valerie is at the end of "Snake"--sensing a confrontation may one day come, and she will need to find the anger and desire for her own happiness to arise to meet it. But in "Omakase," the protagonist hasn't actually done anything. There's been no challenge laid upon her to meet, and so we don't really see if she's changed. The story ends with her picturing herself doing something violent to her obnoxious boyfriend, but that might actually be a step backwards rather than forward.

There's no ambivalence about Valerie's arc. She's a different person. She's gone from passive selflessness--not speaking her needs in order to keep the peace--to active selflessness--making her wishes align with fulfilling the wishes of someone else who needs her.

It's definitely a more satisfying story. But is it realistic? Did I dislike "Omakase" for the same reason I almost walked out on "Uncut Gems"? Because I just don't like facing what people are really like?

I'll admit that more people in life, when faced with the knowledge they need to change, either forcibly block out that message, like Howard Radner in "Gems," or they just chew ineffectively on the message, like "the woman" in "Omakase." Mediocre students in the school of life don't typically get a 100% on the big pop quiz life drops on them.

But there's a reason we often choose stories that aren't typical life. That's why the logic of stories doesn't work like life. If fiction really just "mirrored" life, as in the old trope, what would we need stories for? Stories are for telling us what could be as much as what is. So while most people do not ace their big test in life the way Valerie did, IF someone is going to do the unexpected and rise to the occasion, then the way Valerie did it is as believable a story of that happening as I can imagine reading.