Becoming vs. perceiving

TV is doing satire better than books. 

I’m thinking in particular of Succession and The White Lotus—shows that critique their main characters with humor and sophistication. Given how successful these shows have been, you would think there would be more books trying to replicate the formula. But that’s not really the case. I’ve been trying to figure out why.

So this is you:

This is your brain on books:

This is your brain on TV:

Reading a book requires a level of becoming another person. Even if the book has a third-person narrator, there’s still a sense of oneness between character, reader, and author. When you’re reading, your attention is fixed and narrow.

TV, on the other hand, washes over you. If you start getting uncomfortable, you can just distract yourself and the show will keep going. I always notice myself reaching for my phone during the cringier scenes of cringe comedies. It’s so physically uncomfortable to become the character doing the embarrassing thing that I have to remind myself I am not that character. I am Laura, sitting on the couch, opening Instagram.

But books are relentless. Books ask you to ceaselessly inhabit their characters. And some characters are not, frankly, people we want to inhabit.

Take Succession. When I try to convince someone to watch Succession, the reason they usually say they don’t want to is that nobody is likable. It’s true that the characters can be selfish and cruel and manipulative and petty; it’s also true that a lot of viewers were, in fact, willing to put up with these unlikable people for four glorious seasons. Because we are merely putting up with them. We are peeking into the lives of the rich and powerful. We’re spying on them, trying to ascertain what their rapid insults and fleeting facial expressions are meant to telegraph. We are flies on their Gilded Age walls; but at no point are we asked to be these people. Just to watch them. Just to feel like we’re better than them.

Writing about rich people is hard. Readers just don’t have a huge surplus of spare empathy for people who fly business. There’s a school of thought that says we like stories because they help us rehearse for potential scenarios in our own futures; by that logic, it’s fatiguing to hear about problems we can only dream of having—fighting over an inheritance, for example, or trying to fit in among the Upper East Side moms. What we want from rich people stories is justice. We want Kendall Roy to get fired; we want the guests at the White Lotus to realize their marriages are miserable. But in a book, a main character’s fall from grace doesn’t feel so satisfying—because it feels more like our own fall from grace.

I think we are all getting worse at separating authors from characters from readers. We’re quick to call something autofiction—by which I mean, “This character cheated on her partner, so I will assume the author also cheated on her partner, and I do not want to abet this infraction.” Also: “And anyone who liked this book is probably a cheater.”

All of which is to say, I’m interested in when books do try to feature characters who aren’t particularly likable. I just finished Long Island Compromise, which features a cast of people who have been deeply traumatized, in one way or another, by their wealth. I really enjoyed it, but I think some readers will be frustrated by how unpleasant some of these characters can be. It’s daring to create a cast like this. If a novel takes an unpleasant cast and redeems them all, the story feels saccharine and fake. If the novel declines to redeem them, the story feels like a long plod of cynical inertia—full of sound and fury but ultimately signifying an unsatisfying nothing.

The easy, tempting thing is to ask readers to be more dour and serious. Stop reading for the plot! Read for my takedown of capitalism! 

But that’s not why most people read in 2024. Some stories just work better in one medium over another because of how they ask the audience to engage—and what they ask the audience to compromise along the way. We read to become; we watch to perceive.

Currently reading: Beautyland by Marie-Helene Bertino. I have no idea where it’s going but I am so along for the ride.

Non-urgent thought of the week: Will anyone notice I was too vain to give myself gross fly-colored wings and instead gave myself pretty fairy wings? Only time will tell.

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