The Great American Novel?

Jennifer Szalai and Mohsin Hamid, writing in the Times, ask, "Where are the best American novels written by women?"

Both writers evade the question by arguing that it's a flawed question.

Szalai, for example, turns the question by asking why we even debate it:

Instead of the Great American Novel, maybe we should be talking more about our Great American Fixation, the insistent desire to find the book that tells us who we are. How we define that search — what counts, what doesn’t — has said as much about “the American soul” as any novel that’s supposed to do the same.

Similarly, Hamid dismisses the question as simplistic:

The point of there being a notion of the Great American Novel is to elevate fiction. It’s a target for writers to aim at. It’s a mythological beast, an impossible mountaintop, a magical vale in the forest, a place to get storytellers dreaming of one day reaching. It keeps you warm when times are cold, and times in the world of writing for a living are mostly cold.

Likable characters?

Should writers create "likable characters" for their readers? Two novelists, Mohsin Hamid and Zoe Heller, debate this question. Hamid reframes the question, asking:

Perhaps, in the widespread longing for likable characters, there is this: a desire, through fiction, for contact with what we’ve armored ourselves against in the rest of our lives, a desire to be reminded that it’s possible to open our eyes, to see, to recognize our solitude — and at the same time to not be entirely alone.

Heller suggests, however, that the question is an important one that needs to be answered. Although she's not wholly comfortable with the idea that readers need to "like" fictional characters, she concedes that readers do need to care about them:

Other fictional characters may invite or accommodate more complex responses, but most authors aim to engender some species of readerly empathy for their protagonists. It’s not necessary to “like” Hamlet, but if we’re so repelled by his treatment of that sweet girl, Ophelia, that we withdraw all sympathetic interest in his dilemmas, then the play is unlikely to mean much to us.