When the novelist Claire Messud was asked if she would want to be friends with Nora, the rage-filled protagonist of her novel The Woman Upstairs, she let rip. “For heaven’s sake, what kind of question is that? Would you want to be friends with Humbert Humbert? Would you want to be friends with . . . Hamlet? Krapp? or Oedipus?
“If you are reading to find friends, you are in deep trouble. We read to explore life, in all its possibilities. The relevant question is not ‘Is this a potential friend for me?’ but ‘Is this character alive?’”
Messud pointed out that the same question would not have been asked of a male protagonist. Her fellow novelist, Meg Wolitzer, the author of, among other things, The Interestings, identified a trend for “slumber party fiction — as though the characters are stand-ins for your best friends”.