Don Draper and Greg House

It’s a hot, torpid July 4^th, but there’s always work to do when it comes to promoting a novel. Not to mention that I haven’t written much on the new work-in-progress. My latest effort is recording myself reading a dramatic chapter from The Mermaid’s Pendant to post to GoodReads, Facebook and YouTube. And my own Web site, of course. Being videotaped ranks right up there with cleaning out the fridge and clipping the cat’s nails (kitty does not like having his nails clipped, thank you), but I won’t make it to many bookstores this year. Besides, this is the brave new world of being an author.

While the video downloads, I’ve been thinking about characters I’ve grown attached to lately on TV. Conflicted male characters to be exact.

It started with Greg House. Maybe it’s my natural admiration of wise-ass middle-aged scruffy men, but I kept finding enough redeeming qualities in House to want to watch the show beyond the medical mysteries facing his team. House had enough softness hidden under his prickly shell that my hope response kicked in (or maybe my subconscious desire to reform bad boys, which I thought I’d outgrown, simply revived from a dormant state). I want House to grow and heal enough to be happy. Is that possible with TV?

Then I moved on to watching Mad Men. This love affair took a little longer to establish. The first three episodes disturbed me more than many so-called horror shows. This time, Don Draper, silver-tongued ad man in a male-dominated early 60s New York, had little to attract me. I stuck with it if only because of the show’s atmosphere and a sick fascination with the culture. Then I had a real shock: Don had a hidden wife in the suburbs. The creepy factor for him rose about 50 notches, though his perfect wife’s calm target practice with the neighbor’s birds rounded the creepiness out nicely so that I no longer felt Don was quite so far gone. I finally understood that this world operated on different rules. A few more secrets revealed, and I realized that Don was a tormented soul with some hard-to-circumscribe boundary lines—for example, he didn’t sleep with any of the gaggle of secretaries at his ad agency—that nevertheless meant he did have some moral code, even if it was sporadically applied to his life. I came to identify a bit with him, with his upbringing and his double identity, and I wanted him to figure out how to hold on to his dreams without screwing them up too much.

Why are these two “complicated” men so compelling? Why doesn’t the angst they suffer overwhelm and repel us? They are both real and magnetic. Other people revolve around them. They make things happen. They’re hard to pin down—they aren’t a “type” and are as likely to disappoint as to inspire us. What we don’t know about them, what we learn adds depth and shading to them. We meet people like House and Don in books too. People we’d like to have a beer with. Or shake until they wise up. Or put an arm around and cry with. I’m always on the lookout for characters like these, and I never know where I’ll meet them. Middle grade, YA, adult—literary, romance, science fiction—I find them all over the place, but no place predictably.

I guess that's what I look for in most of the books I read: people to care about. Adventure and learning and falling in love again are all good things, but I really feel a part of humanity when I connect with someone, even if he's a character.