Great art is challenging and sometimes uncomfortable: we might not like Patty in Franzen's Freedom or Gilbert Osmond in The Portrait of a Lady and we certainly don't like Nabokov's Humbert Humbert, despite his seductive, "fancy prose style", but these are characters through whom we may learn something of the human soul. There is a utility here we must not lose. Far from denigrating dislikeable characters, we should celebrate them: without them, fiction would be a depressingly anodyne proposition.