Following upon the dispute about Philip Roth's Man Booker International Prize, there's a piece in today's Telegraph that tries to get to the bottom of it by a discussion of liking and not liking a novel's characters. Philip Hensher argues that one can finish a novel and, however good it may be in various literary-technical respects, you just don't like it because you don't like the people in it. Hensher immediately goes on to say that liking the characters in any straightforward way is not a valid requirement: you don't have to like Raskolnikov to think that Crime and Punishment is a great book and to enjoy it. But in some more subtle, secondary meaning, liking a novel's characters is important to liking the novel.
I think this is a simple conflation on Hensher's part of liking the characters with being interested in them: interested enough to be bothered reading about them. For this, I don't think that liking on any level is needed. In novel after novel, there are people one warms to, others who can be a pain, yet others who neither attract nor repel, and so on. The only thing is whether the writer engages you enough to want to follow what these people do and what happens to them. Liking, it seems to me, doesn't come into it - unless liking is just made to mean being interested in them.
On the other hand, there is no real mystery in the different opinions lately expressed about Philip Roth. On this Hensher is quite right; some readers just don't like him (as plenty of other readers just do). There's no mystery because where, after all, is there a writer who is universally liked. The divine Jane? No. Dickens? No. Cormac McCarthy? Definitely not. Iris Murdoch? Thomas Hardy? I can't think of a single author whose work I enjoy about which someone hasn't said to me that they can't stand it.