The margins of my books are filled with handwritten annotations such as 'Absolutely not' and 'STOP IT!!!!' and 'girl get UP.' These are not necessarily critiques of the story; some are expressions of high praise. Several of my favorite titles are full of characters who utterly vex, agitate, and perturb me. I know I'm not alone in this; my colleague Lily Meyer, in a recent Atlantic essay, found Andrew Martin's Down Time, a novel full of irritating people, to be a useful reflection of the society we live in. I agree with her, and I'll go a step further: Let books be annoying. Characters'in both fiction and nonfiction'should be as exasperating as people can be. As Meyer writes, 'Annoying characters let us admit that we might be annoying too.' I'm on record praising Alison Bechdel for letting the main character of her long-running comic strip, Dykes to Watch Out For, be a huge, neurotic drag. I'm also moved by memoirs that neither valorize nor sanitize the author's bad behavior. 'Own...
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