antipathy
Earlier this year I learned about an early Sinclair Lewis novel, written before World War I and before the novels that made him famous: The Job, about a young woman who looks for work and ends up going into real estate. That sounded interesting, so I checked the University of Kansas library and found a copy I could borrow.
I found the opening part less rewarding than I hoped: Despite her promising start as an outstanding student at a business college, Una Golden became more a figure of pathos, holding an unrewarding job, living with an unhappy widowed mother, and being courted by a man who had no prospect of being able to support a wife. Lewis had her move from a small town in Pennsylvania to New York City, but then showed her too timid to explore her new home.
Then, at the end of the first part, after Una's mother died, she decided to move from their apartment to a room in a boarding house. That faced her with the problem of what to do with her mother's aging canary. She couldn't bring herself to ask family friends to take it in, or try to find it a new home, and she couldn't even bring herself to wring its neck. Instead she took it outside, in her hand, and tossed it away repeatedly, and then went back inside, leaving it, for all she knew, to go hungry until some street cat managed to catch it and eat it-but she hadn't killed it. And at that point I lost all sympathy for the character, and all desire to read about her.
I had a similar effect, years before, from Harry Turtledove's Supervolcano series, in which one of the characters, a refugee from the Yellowstone eruption, is told she can't get into a shelter if she brings her cat-so she dumps him on the street, to walk through the volcanic ash, because she can't bring herself to take him to be euthanized. That made that character unsympathetic, too-but in that case I was able to go on reading, because Turtledove had already shown the character as unsympathetic, and because there were other characters in the novel who were more sympathetic. I suppose I might have felt that way about The Job, had it had more than one viewpoint character, or any characters who were shown sympathetically.
I found the opening part less rewarding than I hoped: Despite her promising start as an outstanding student at a business college, Una Golden became more a figure of pathos, holding an unrewarding job, living with an unhappy widowed mother, and being courted by a man who had no prospect of being able to support a wife. Lewis had her move from a small town in Pennsylvania to New York City, but then showed her too timid to explore her new home.
Then, at the end of the first part, after Una's mother died, she decided to move from their apartment to a room in a boarding house. That faced her with the problem of what to do with her mother's aging canary. She couldn't bring herself to ask family friends to take it in, or try to find it a new home, and she couldn't even bring herself to wring its neck. Instead she took it outside, in her hand, and tossed it away repeatedly, and then went back inside, leaving it, for all she knew, to go hungry until some street cat managed to catch it and eat it-but she hadn't killed it. And at that point I lost all sympathy for the character, and all desire to read about her.
I had a similar effect, years before, from Harry Turtledove's Supervolcano series, in which one of the characters, a refugee from the Yellowstone eruption, is told she can't get into a shelter if she brings her cat-so she dumps him on the street, to walk through the volcanic ash, because she can't bring herself to take him to be euthanized. That made that character unsympathetic, too-but in that case I was able to go on reading, because Turtledove had already shown the character as unsympathetic, and because there were other characters in the novel who were more sympathetic. I suppose I might have felt that way about The Job, had it had more than one viewpoint character, or any characters who were shown sympathetically.