The best books with characters you do not want for friends

Getting a reader engaged with an unlikeable protagonist is a challenge to any novelist.

Moshfegh succeeds brilliantly here. Eileen is as unlikeable as they come, an angry, friendless young woman who hates herself and everyone else. She works in a reprehensible, small-town prison for juvenile offenders and shares a squalid house with her nasty father.

Suddenly, though, a lovely young woman joins the prison staff. To Eileen’s amazement, she befriends her. Within days, she also involves her in a violent crime. Does this sound grim? Repellant? It’s not.

Granted, Eileen isn’t a book to be read over lunch. But the protagonist is like no woman I’ve ever met in fiction (or, thankfully, anywhere else). Her voice is fresh, her anger invigorating, and the book gripping from top to tail.

This book was a bestseller, and not only thanks to its clever plot.

The writing is terrific: sharp, fresh, witty, full of details that snag your attention. The characters are both quirky and fully dimensional. If you saw the movie but never read the book, please turn that around. I believe a novel is a film that unspools in your head: Your reading breathes life into the characters, your mind’s eye creates the action, the voice of the writer speaks inside you.

For me, a book has an intimacy a movie never can—and Flynn’s characters repay intimacy, even though it comes with a big side order of queasiness. Who exactly are these people? What have they done? The question gets more puzzling and urgent with each page.

My brief career as a mystery writer happened to coincide with my son’s years a preschooler. What luck!

Quietly bumping off imaginary people was the perfect complement to keeping calm with a screaming toddler. There’s a reason people read murder mysteries, and it isn’t because we can’t imagine ever wanting to kill someone. (My son survived.)

In this classic psychological thriller, Highsmith lets us know from the jump that her “talented” protagonist is a thief and a liar. Things go swiftly downhill from there, on their way to far worse crimes, but Highsmith’s prose and her pacing are so perfect, her voice so imperturbable, that I couldn’t possibly have closed the book. Not the first time I read it, and not the second, either.

One night, decades after I first read James’s suspenseful gem of a novel, the book suddenly came to mind.

For years, I’d been struggling with how to fit together two women whose voices had been haunting my head. Now, in a flash, I saw the parallels they offered to the characters in Aspern. A determined, none-too-scrupulous scholar (male, in James’s book), an elderly woman who’d had a secret affair with a celebrated man, the two living together in the ruins of a once-elegant home, and a cache of hoarded papers the scholar desperately wants…

I dissected Aspern chapter by chapter, then gently fitted my characters onto its skeleton. Voilà: Must Read Well. “We stand on the shoulders of giants,” writers sometimes say. Also, “Steal from the best.”

Korelitz’s protagonist, Jake Bonner, is the author of a fairly successful first novel. But that was years ago, and with the promise of that book as yet unfulfilled, he’s been miserably sinking out of view ever since.

By the time we meet him, he is desperate for another success. But you probably know all this, because The Plot itself was a huge bestseller. Korelitz lights the fuse for her story when Jake becomes a thief, stealing a nifty idea for a—well, see her title.

Would I want to meet Jake? Not especially. But as fictional company, he and the small cast of vivid characters that collect around him in this tightly plotted book are a pleasure to know.