Best Books With Unlikeable Protagonists
TL;DR — For charming monsters, read The Talented Mr. Ripley or Lolita. For satire, American Psycho. For thrillers, Gone Girl. For mothers and blame, We Need to Talk About Kevin. For self-absorption played for dark comedy, My Year of Rest and Relaxation. For a gentler kind of unlikeable, The Remains of the Day.
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Take the quizCharming monsters
The Talented Mr. Ripley, Patricia Highsmith (1955). Tom Ripley is sent to Italy to bring a rich man's son home and decides he'd rather become him. Highsmith makes you hope he gets away with it, which is the unsettling point.
Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov (1955). Humbert Humbert narrates his abuse of 12-year-old Dolores Haze in dazzling prose meant to win you over. The novel's power is in the cracks that show who he really is. Difficult, and essential.
American Psycho, Bret Easton Ellis (1991). Patrick Bateman, investment banker and killer, cares more about business cards than people. A satire of 1980s greed with passages of extreme violence.
Thrillers
Gone Girl, Gillian Flynn (2012). Nick and Amy Dunne alternate chapters, and both lie. One of the most successful thrillers of the century.
We Need to Talk About Kevin, Lionel Shriver (2003). Eva writes to her husband about their son, who committed a school massacre, and about whether she loved him. Won the Orange Prize.
Darkly comic
My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Ottessa Moshfegh (2018). A young, wealthy, grieving New Yorker uses a terrible psychiatrist's prescriptions to sleep through 2000. Cruel and very funny.
Quietly unlikeable
The Remains of the Day, Kazuo Ishiguro (1989). Stevens, an English butler, recalls decades of service to a lord who sympathised with the Nazis, and the love he ignored. Not cruel, just devastatingly blind. Won the Booker Prize.
Our verdict
Start with The Talented Mr. Ripley. If you want something harder, Lolita; something funnier, Moshfegh.
Frequently asked questions
Is Lolita meant to be romantic? No. Humbert Humbert's lyrical narration is designed to seduce the reader into overlooking abuse, and the novel exposes that. Nabokov makes the horror visible in what he admits.
What's a funny book with an unlikeable narrator? My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh, whose narrator's contempt for everyone is darkly hilarious.
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