Rohan Maitzen has posted on her blog an extended discussion of her experience reading Martin Amis's Money with her book club. Rohan says she disliked the novel because of its morally odious narrator, but also describes the character as "memorable," with a "distinctive and unforgettable voice." She as well admits the novel is "sometimes LOL funny" and that Amis's style is at times "virtuosic."
Pretty clearly Rohan (and her book club colleagues) could not get past the intrinsic assumption that a fictional character is to be regarded as a person, to whom we respond in the same way as we would an actual person--we wouldn't want to know the protagonist of Money in real life, so why should we put up with him in this novel? This is an assumption I have never shared, and in this case it has led Rohan as a reader to overlook what she has herself identified as the novel's aesthetic virtues. Rohan's reaction to Amis's novel suggests to me that we have fundamentally different expectations of what a work of fiction is for.
For me, a work of fiction is a verbal fabrication that has as its goal the creation of artistic effects precisely like a "distinctive voice" or an act of sustained comedy. Rohan concedes that Amis wants us to dislike his narrator, so this, too, might be considered an artistic achievement in Money. If we do dislike this character, Amis has succeeded in setting up a reading experience in which we will have to wrestle with the moral complexity of reading about him, anyway.
I will go out on a limb here and say that works of fiction, far from being "empathy machines" by which we come to be closer to "other people," should be a space in which we discard our ordinary concerns for actual people altogether. We might instead contemplate the way in which "character" is simply another device the writer may use to take us into a verbal world not just of moral complexity but one that doesn't operate by ordinary moral principles at all. This is a world where imagination and "virtuosity" with language are the supreme values, although of course the artistic vision expressed by the writer might raise all sorts of questions that might have all sorts of moral implications when we return to the world "outside the text."
Rohan suggests there is an inherent difference between women readers of a writer like Amis and his more numerous male readers. But I think this again is really the difference between regarding characters in a work of fiction as persons and considering them the effects of language. I certainly don't believe only male readers such as myself (and I am no doubt in a minority of male readers in my own assumptions about reading) would want to think about literary works in this latter way. And unquestionably many male readers of Martin Amis are themselves responding to Amis's work for features beyond its implications for an aesthetic theory of fiction. (I should also say that, although I do like Money, I am not otherwise a particular enthusiast for Amis's fiction.)
If we should respond to fictional characters as if they are real people, what is the point of creating fictional characters at all? Just tell me about some real people you admire and maybe I will admire them too.