Finding the right question

Can a reader like a novel when he or she does not like the main characters or the plot? I was compelled to consider this question on completion of my book club’s April selection, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai. The book came with the imprimatur of the literary community – shortlisted for the 2025 Booker Prize, fawning and starred reviews in major publications, respectable ratings on Good Reads and Amazon, and President Obama put it on his list of favorite books for 2025. As far as reception of a novel goes, a writer can’t hope for much better than that. All of the accolades make it hard for me to disagree. But I, sort of, do.

Owing to my discomfort with saying anything negative about anything ever, I will lead with praise. Kiran Desai is one of the most talented American literary novelists publishing today. Her writing is always beautiful and occasionally sublime. She has a particular gift for capturing a facet of humanity so singular while at the same time so universal in just a few sentences. Her descriptions of the human condition feel simultaneously fresh and familiar, rarified and relatable. Now that I got that out, on to what I did not like about this particular book. The short answer is everything, except for the writing. (Yes, I am aware that in literary fiction the writing is of primary, in some opinions singular, importance. My apologies to the purists.)

It pains me to be critical of anyone’s labor, particularly a writer, but if I am honest, which I try to be, I found the titular characters to be almost completely unlikeable albeit in completely different ways. Sonia is an unhappy bordering on miserable young woman who was so inert and lacking in agency that I would have shaken her if I could. Sunny is self-righteous, self-pitying, boring, and kind of a jerk. None of the secondary characters were much better. The one somewhat likable character, Satya, was presented as a chubby simpleton, to the extent that I envisioned him wearing a tee shirt with the words, “You are not supposed to like me,” printed on the front. Worse than all of that, the plot was not compelling, just two unhappy people who muddle through life and eventually stumble their way into each other. After false starts and contretemps, they end up together and, presumably albeit ambiguously, somewhat less unhappy. That’s it. For a short story that might be enough, but if a writer requests six hundred and seventy six pages of reading time, something more than miserable people being miserable until, after a lot of misery, they end up a bit less miserable, maybe, seems in order.

There is also the always pending question of literary fiction, i.e. what themes is the writer exploring in the novel. In good literary fiction, the writer explores themes, ideas, questions, etc. through the characters and the plot, such that the reader is drawn to consider, think about, vicariously experience, and, when the book is really good, feel these themes, ideas, etc. Beautiful thoughts, new understandings, critical explorations, and so much more have been launched through that type of literary fiction. In this type of literary fiction, the author states the political, social, and cultural points she wants to make either through one of the unlikeable characters simply saying the words or authorial asides. Neither of these methods were particularly successful and, if I am scrupulously honest, I occasionally rolled my eyes and thought, “Ok, we get it, you want us to think X about Y.”  

One of a myriad of criteria I use to judge a book is the question: Would I recommend this book to a friend? My answer for The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny would have to be in the negative. No matter how beautiful the prose, I would feel bad encroaching on almost seven hundred pages of a friend’s reading time. Perhaps a better question for this book would be: If I were teaching a creative writing class, would I assign it? I think this is a better question because I could reply in the affirmative, which is always my preference. There is much to learn about creative writing in all of those pages.

I suppose that was all a long way of saying that my answer to the opening question is a reader can admire a book she does not like.