Third Person Limited recently reviewed Ivy Pochoda’s Ecstasy, a novel that I found to represent an interesting test case for the limits of fictional “likeability”. The fecklessness of Pochoda’s main character, Lena — a conspicuously wealthy widow who still makes time in her day to wax philosophical about her own lack of purpose — certainly puts her in the crosshairs of that dreaded literary assignation. I was often torn between wanting Lena to stay true to herself and an impulse to judge her for her lack of self-awareness, particularly concerning class. This created a whiplash effect that distracted from the novel’s themes and made its virtues shine less brightly. Yet Lena’s unlikeability also revealed something deeper to me about the way ethics interacts with aesthetics, and how characters reflect the worldviews of their authors.
The likeability of fictional characters is well-worn critical trope. In 2013, the staff of The New Yorker collaborated on a forum titled “Would You Want to Be Friends With Humbert Humbert?” with the strong implication that, no you wouldn’t, but also that it shouldn’t matter for critically assessing Lolita. Literature is literature, and real life is real life. A character can be unlikeable while offering profound insights into the human condition. Humbert does not need to be cancelled for his crimes; he does not actually exist, except in a book that emphatically does not soft-pedal how disgusting he is.
The year after, in 2014, I wrote a piece for Electric Literature on what had been dubbed the “Cult of Likeability,” citing Claire Messud, Jonathan Franzen, Roxane Gay, Zoe Heller, Emily Gould, and Frank Portman, all of whom found likeability a silly criterion for literary critique, though some deemed the backlash equally ridiculous. Recent pieces in The New York Times and Slate also surfaced. At the time, likeability seemed to be having a moment. It was one of those things bookish people had to talk about mainly because other people were talking about it.
But branding likeability as unimportant has not made the term go away entirely. This year, Laura Leffler explored the feminist implications of likeability in a piece for LitHub. “Like many women I know,” she writes, “I’ve wasted a good amount of my time on Earth trying to be likable. I’ve sat quietly, apologized for my presence, dressed for the male gaze.” Leffler is not wrong. The burden disproportionately falls on women, and as an index of pliability to male desire, likeability is an unfair and hateful expectation to place on anyone.
At this point in the conversation, it’s difficult to know what the term ‘likeability” actually means. If likeability is itself unlikeable, what is left? Should we be expected somehow to like what we don’t like? The best commentary tends to note the term’s shallowness. As soon as one has brought up the ida of whether one likes something, other questions should invariably follow, such as “why don’t you like it?” Likeability is not a category of value that can exist on its own. It is more epiphenomenon than substance; it illuminates other, more important judgments.
Which brings us back to Pochoda’s novel. Ecstasy is meant to be a modern retelling of Euripides’ The Bacchae. The original play relates the tale of Pentheus, king of Thebes, whose rejection of the god Dionysius brings about his death at the hands of the Maenads, a group of women raving in ecstatic furor over their love of the god. In Pochoda’s retelling, real estate mogul Drew stands in for Pentheus, who has recently inherited a swanky resort. He stays there with Lena, his mother; Jordan, his wife; and his aunt, Hedy. Meanwhile, a group of squatters camping on the adjoining beach threatens to ruin the family’s fun, though they also awaken in Lena and Hedy a wild and not-so-distant past.
Both sisters had been legendary in the rave scene of the 90s, tripping over the globe from festival to festival, high on any number of substances. Lena, at least, has left that lifestyle behind, though the leader of the squatters, Luz, recognizes in her a kindred spirit and draws Lena back to her old ways. As Luz and her cohort dance around a bonfire in Drew’s private beach, it brings out something primal in Lena, something that gives her license to confront her son about the many inequities that exist between then, his misogyny, his poor treatment of his wife, and myriad other family tensions that come bubbling to the surface. The confrontation takes a more violent turn, when the three women drink wine Luz has spiked with hallucinogens. Just as in the original tale, when King Pentheus falls prey to the Dionysian ecstasy of the Maenads, Drew also finds himself at the mercy of this group of women given over to a cult of pleasure.
But while the novel’s end is arresting and unforgettable in its sudden violence, something about the novel as a whole rings false. The problem with Pochoda’s framing is that the modern retelling of the story does not adequately consider the shifting cultural landscape between ancient and modern. One can’t tell a story in 2025 about a listless millionaire without also questioning to what degree the depiction of conspicuous wealth itself has become morally suspect.
Pochoda clearly sides with the downtrodden; her bored millionaires are not nice people, and we’re not meant to side with them. Meanwhile, Luz teaches Lena and the other women something important about reclaiming their position in the world, while the novel’s villain, Drew, comes off as a controlling, misogynistic creep, ripe for overthrow. Yet the novel offers no real alternative to the gravitational pull of Drew’s wealth. Luz’s ecstatic fury seems more idiosyncratic than a valid class critique would demand, more the whims of an oddball than the opening shots of a revolution. Luz and her band of ecstatic would-be Maenads offer no real answer to Drew. The pseudo-religious ecstasy of Pochoda’s raving squatters provides such a weak counterpoint to Drew’s crass materialism that the exercise ends up amounting to something quite cynical.
The power of Pochoda’s villain is undeniable, because we currently live in a world groaning under the influence of men just like him. We recognize Drew in the faces of hateful men in power that we see on the news. Pochoda’s heroes, however, offer no such immediate recognition, and the consumption of substances as an answer to capitalistic overconsumption offers little comfort. This is, of course, unfair to Pochoda, because comfort was never necessarily a part of her program. Her concerns, in this profoundly uncomforting story, are otherwise. But in a novel about bad, wealthy people, ought they to be?
Lena is unlikeable not where unlikeability is an end in itself, but for reasons, namely that she is painfully unself-aware, and in fact it’s by virtue of her lack of awareness that her enemy meets his end. Totally absent from her story are any working-class people for whom Lena’s and Drew’s wealth could have made a difference. Instead we are expected to be content with the binary between ostentatious affluence and a different sort of decadence in the form of enlightened, ecstatic debauchery, even though the novel offers no real reason as to why the world should be carved up this way in the first place.
