Why I Created Jack Sparks, the Loathsome Liar, by Jason Arnopp

One particularly unfortunate piece of writing advice is that the lead character must be likable. This dubious nugget of wisdom is one I ignored entirely while writing my novel The Last Days Of Jack Sparks.
Clearly, great fiction is awash with mistreated underdogs who deserve so much better (but enough about authors, ho ho) and strong survivors whose brave persistence wins our hearts, but that isn’t always the case. We could spend the rest of the day yapping about countless exceptions, citing the likes of Stephen King’s Jack Torrance or Chuck Palahniuk’s nameless Fight Club narrator or Mary Shelley’s Victor Frankenstein.
But ultimately, we only need one novel to demonstrate conclusively how “rootability” is far from a requirement: Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho. Super-shallow yuppie Patrick Bateman is as loathsome as it’s possible for a lead character to be, and yet we are willfully dragged into his utterly horrendous and possibly delusional world. There are two main reasons for this. The first is that we sense the author is using Bateman to highlight a cold society that prizes surface over feeling. But mainly, we find Bateman interesting. We want to know what makes him tick. We want to know why his blank areas are so damn blank.

The main character should interest us, then, and ideally downright fascinate us. To this end, characters tend to score bonus points for going against their society’s grain in some way. But whatever the reason, we should want to know what they’re going to do next. A certain degree of unknowability helps here. Volatility, even. The most fascinating characters tend to have one thing in common: we’re never entirely sure how they’ll react to any given situation. Whether the main character is a hero, a villain or one of the anti-heroes that populate George R.R. Martin’s work, they should raise an endless procession of question marks in our heads.
Jack Sparks, the main character in The Last Days Of Jack Sparks, is a celebrity journalist and author who sets out to debunk the supernatural in his latest non-fiction book, which he is destined to die writing. Packing an ego so big it occupies a neighboring zip code, Jack’s a terrible man who cares only about broadcasting his own dogma, whether in person or via social media. Yet readers tell me how they love to hate him. Some folk marvel at how they start out despising him, but ultimately feel sympathy, or at least pity. Oddly enough, I think Jack holds readers’ interest partly because he’s a liar. From quite early on in the book, Jack will give us one version of events while his surviving older brother Alistair presents us with another—one that suggests Jack is full of bravado and bluster.

Unreliable narrators seem increasingly popular in fiction. Perhaps Gone Girl whipped up this current wave. Who knows—maybe we subconsciously crave unreliable narrators to help us separate fact from fiction on social media, so that we may more shrewdly discern the truth about our friends’ carefully curated lives. But unreliable narration also makes for strong three-dimensional characters, because it establishes that they have an internal and external personality. All realistic characters wear figurative masks to some degree, otherwise they’d walk around saying what they think and feel, which the vast majority of people don’t do in real life. But unreliable narration establishes a character as a deeper box, packed with tantalizing lies and truths. There’s no truth more enticing than one which someone tries to hide from us—and maybe even from themselves.
In order for a liar to work as both a character and a storytelling device, however, there should be good reasons for their dishonesty. A person’s lies, and their reasons for lying, must shed light on their personality. It’s generally no good for someone to tell us a bunch of stuff, only to reveal it as totally false, purely for the sake of a plot twist. And so the more we learn about Jack Sparks’ lies, the more we uncover about him and perhaps the more invested we become in seeing the full picture.
If making your main character an infuriatingly insincere ego maniac might still seem like quite the risk, then in my case it was calculated to some degree. Right from page one—from the book’s title, in fact—we know Jack’s going to die. So hopefully, the reader gets the idea that he’s destined to be brought down a peg or two. Then in the opening scenes, we learn that Jack suffered trauma as a child. And because we’re reading the non-fiction book that Jack wrote, I wanted him to come across as a good writer. Someone who makes you laugh, despite yourself. If someone makes us laugh, we’re more likely to forgive their less desirable aspects. And maybe, just maybe, we do see some of our own worst traits reflected in Jack. Perhaps we glimpse some kind of insight as to what the internet has done to our brains.
Without some, or even all, of the above mitigating factors being present, Jack Sparks may have toppled from the tightrope he (hopefully) walks between Interesting and Insufferable. So yes, caveats do apply when it comes to making characters less than likable. But many more caveats should apply to snake oil salesmen who insist that your lead character needs to dash around being kind to animals and old ladies in the first five pages. Characters can do that, but the key thing to remember is that they don’t need to. They can also be utterly selfish sociopaths who lie through their teeth at every opportunity.
Characters can do anything, in fact. The only absolute is that we must continually yearn to know what that next thing will be.
The Last Days of Jack Sparks is available now from Orbit.