by Sidney S. Stark
‘She doesn’t have any character,’ ‘Lord, what a character!’ or ‘It was really out of character’, all describe different traits within the parameters of personality, temperament and moral fiber. So clearly character can mean many different things to different people in various settings. But what does it mean to an author of fiction? Is it the same to some degree as the meanings we assign to it in everyday life or is there more to it?
That was the topic discussed at a lecture at the New York Society Library recently. The dialogue was between two highly accomplished and much lauded authors with different ideas on the subject. Meg Wolitzer and Elizabeth Strout are known for writing pages of fiction inhabited by wonderfully engaging people. Elizabeth gave me permission to use that adverb by the way. She loves judiciously placed adverbs. And since the characters these two women create are full of the wonder of life and its mysteries, I feel I’ve chosen the adverb with prudence.
The blurb announcing this lecture as ‘A Conversation About Character and Contemporary Fiction’ included a phrase asking ‘Who Are These People, and Why Do We Care? It might have added the query, ‘Or Do We In Fact Care At All?’ We don’t have to like them, but we have to care. Both authors seemed to be in agreement about a few key ingredients that must be part of the ‘primordial soup’, as Meg Wolitzer put it, in order for us to believe in the validity of fictional characters. But there were definitely nuances to their analysis that took them in different directions.