Books where you root for the wrong person are a distinct pleasure, and the people who go looking for them are a distinct kind of reader. You know who you are. You spent Vanity Fair wanting Becky Sharp to get away with it. You backed Daniel Cleaver for the whole first half of Bridget Jones and felt faintly cheated when the diamond-patterned jumper won. You have, at some point, caught yourself hoping a murderer makes his train. It isn't a moral failing. It's a reading instinct, and it's the right one: you follow the energy in a book, and the energy is almost never with the person who deserves to win.
Novelists know this. The wrong person is usually the one who wants something the most, and wanting is the engine of a story. The right person — the steady husband, the sensible cousin, the fiancé with the pension — is generally there to be got past. So a certain kind of writer builds the temptation on purpose: makes the cad funnier, the affair more alive, the doomed plan more thrilling than the safe one, and then watches what you do with it. The eleven novels below all play that game, and every one of them knows exactly what it's doing to you.
Fair notice. Some of these will let you have what you're rooting for. That's the part that stays with you.
The charmer you shouldn't be backing
The Twin Flame Game — Adam Eccles
Keith Myatt has money, a passport full of stamps and a job title — global comfort quality inspector for his family's chain of luxury hotels — that his older brother invented to keep him out of the building. He lives out of suitcases. He keeps one phone for work and one for women. He has cutting opinions on everything and a hollow where a life should be, and he knows it, which is the first thing that makes you like him against your better judgement.
Then a woman he's met on a dating app in London tells him, quite kindly, that he isn't her twin flame. She'll still sleep with him; he just isn't the one. Keith has never heard the phrase, so he looks it up: one soul split into two bodies, destiny dragging the halves back together, whole forums of people waiting for the sign. And here is where you should stop rooting for him and won't. He decides the twin flame idea is the best dating strategy he's ever seen. He studies profiles, favourite books, favourite songs, the tell-tale details people leave lying around online, and sets out to manufacture the cosmic coincidence to order.
What starts as the most cynical dating strategy on record turns, slowly and against his will, into something closer to an actual search, which is the last thing a man like Keith is equipped for. The comedy is in watching someone with every advantage build the most elaborate possible machine for avoiding the one thing he wants. Lad lit with a spiritual streak: a hedonist with a plan, a plan that deserves to fail, and a reader who wants him to come out of it well anyway.
You will root for Keith Myatt. He'd be the first to tell you not to.
The Talented Mr Ripley — Patricia Highsmith
Tom Ripley is a small-time nobody in 1950s New York, running a half-hearted tax swindle and dodging a life, when a shipping magnate mistakes him for a friend of his son's and pays his passage to Italy to bring the boy home. Dickie Greenleaf is rich, careless, tanned and living in a fishing village south of Naples on his father's money, and Tom takes one look at that life and decides it should be his. What he does to make that happen is the plot, and Highsmith wrote four more books because readers couldn't let him go.
The trick of the novel is proximity. You're inside Tom's head for every near-miss — every knock on the door, every policeman who's a little too curious, every forged signature that might not pass — and the body has an instinct that moves faster than the conscience. You'll want the knock to be nothing. You'll want the signature to pass. Highsmith knew exactly what she was doing: she later said it felt as though Ripley had written the book and she'd merely typed it, and she wrote him with the affection of a novelist who never once expected you to disapprove.
The most likeable murderer in fiction, and the reason the phrase exists.
Vanity Fair — William Makepeace Thackeray
Becky Sharp leaves Miss Pinkerton's academy for young ladies with no money, no family and a presentation dictionary she throws out of the carriage window on the way down the drive, and that is the last time in eight hundred pages she does anything you can't admire on some level. She has wit, nerve, a fine singing voice and no scruples whatsoever, and she uses all four to climb from governess to the drawing rooms of Regency London while Napoleon's war rumbles on somewhere off the page. Thackeray subtitled the book A Novel Without a Hero, which was his way of warning you.
He also gave Becky a foil: Amelia Sedley, sweet, loyal, devoted and about as interesting as a wet Tuesday, and the whole novel is an experiment in what you'll do with that choice. The narrator keeps stepping in to tut at Becky, and every time he does you resent him a little more, because he's spent the previous fifty pages making her the only person in the room with a pulse. It's the first great English novel to bet on your sympathies going where they shouldn't, and to win the bet.
Amelia gets the reader's approval. Becky gets the reader.
Wuthering Heights — Emily Brontë
Heathcliff is brought to a farmhouse on the Yorkshire moors as a foundling from the Liverpool streets, is loved by one Earnshaw child and tormented by the other, vanishes when the girl he loves marries the polite neighbour, and comes back three years later with money, manners and a plan to ruin two families across two generations. He carries the plan out. He is cruel to his wife, his son, his tormentor's son and at least one dog. And for the best part of two centuries readers have decided he's the romantic hero, which tells you more about readers than it does about Heathcliff.
Brontë didn't make that mistake. Her narrators — a fussy visiting gentleman and a housekeeper with a long memory — are both, in their ways, appalled, and she stacks the evidence against him with a thoroughness no prosecutor could improve on. Then she gives him the moor, the storm, the window in the night and the only love in English fiction that treats death as an inconvenience, and none of the evidence matters. You back him. You know better and you back him.
The original wrong person. Everyone since has been working from the template.
The wrong lover
Anna Karenina — Leo Tolstoy
Anna is married to a senior government official twenty years older, has a small son she adores and a reputation without a mark on it, and she meets a cavalry officer on a railway platform in Moscow. Tolstoy takes eight hundred pages to show you what follows and he is scrupulously fair about it: Karenin, the husband, is dry, decent and capable of a generosity that catches you completely off guard, and Vronsky, the lover, is handsome, limited and not remotely worth what she gives up for him. You will root for Vronsky. Every reader has.
The novel has a second story running alongside, about a landowner called Levin who marries the right woman, mows his own fields and worries about God, and it's the half Tolstoy thought mattered. Nobody skips Levin, exactly. But nobody reads the farming chapters at the pace they read the ones where Anna walks into a box at the opera and the whole of St Petersburg turns to look. That's the wager of the book: the good life on one side, the doomed one on the other, and the doomed one getting all the light.
The ending is one of the most famous in fiction. It doesn't make the slightest difference. You back her anyway.
Madame Bovary — Gustave Flaubert
Emma Rouault is a farmer's daughter educated in a convent on a diet of romantic novels, and she marries Charles Bovary, a country doctor in Normandy who adores her, bores her senseless and never once notices either. Then she discovers that the life in the novels is available, at a price, from a local landowner with a practised line and, later, a young clerk with poetry in his pockets. Flaubert was prosecuted over the book in 1857 on the grounds that it made adultery attractive. He was acquitted. The prosecutors had a point.
The genius of it is that Flaubert never lets you off. He shows you the landowner planning the seduction with the cold care of a man pricing a horse; he shows you that the clerk's poetry is bad; he shows you Charles, the wrong man, adoring a woman he doesn't understand and never will. And still you root for Emma to have her afternoon, her carriage ride, her Thursdays in Rouen, because Charles's goodness is so airless that you'd take the bad decisions too. It's the great novel about a bad reader, and the bad reader is you.
The right man is in the room the whole time. You never once look at him.
Conversations with Friends — Sally Rooney
Frances is twenty-one, a student at Trinity, a spoken-word poet with a talent for saying nothing while sounding cool, and she and her best friend Bobbi — also her ex-girlfriend — are adopted by a glamorous married couple in their thirties: Melissa, a writer, and Nick, an actor. Frances starts sleeping with Nick. That's the wrong person by any standard you'd apply in daylight, and Rooney's first novel spends its whole length daring you to apply it.
You won't, because she has rigged it beautifully. Nick is passive, kind, faintly depressed and easy to want. Melissa is never a villain — Rooney is too good for that — but she's also never quite on the page enough to be rooted for. Frances is the one whose head you're in, with her pain nobody has explained and her emails and her clever, brittle deflections, and being inside a person's head is nine-tenths of loyalty. By the time the affair is doing real damage you're in too deep to switch sides. It was Rooney's debut and it's still the sharpest thing she's written about how wanting works.
The married man, the best friend, the lie you tell yourself in the third person. All of it, and you're on her side.
The Soul Bank — Adam Eccles
Andy Clarke is a hardware consultant with a decent enough life: a town-house in the suburbs, a girlfriend called Kirsty with expensive friends and expensive plans, a best mate to hide behind at her dinner parties. Then he spends a forgettable night in a business hotel near an industrial estate in the Home Counties and comes home changed. He can't sleep. There's a tune in his head he can't place. And one night he says a woman's name in his sleep — a name he has never heard in his life — and Kirsty, who believes dreams are the soul telling the truth, draws the obvious conclusion.
The dreams start after that, and they are the wrong person in the purest form on this list. A woman with dark, soulful eyes he has never met. A hillside with a stream running through it. A hotel corridor that goes on too long. They feel more real than his waking life, and that is the exact point where you should be rooting for Andy to see a doctor and instead find yourself rooting for the dream. Kirsty is the right answer on paper, and the book knows it. It also knows you'll want him to choose the woman he has only ever met asleep.
Quiet, psychological, dark around the edges, and built on a very simple bet: that given a real life and a better dream, you'd back the dream.
Rooting against the plot
The Great Gatsby — F. Scott Fitzgerald
Jay Gatsby has made a fortune by means the book is careful not to spell out, bought a mansion on Long Island directly across the water from a married woman he courted for a month five years ago, and throws parties for hundreds of strangers on the off-chance she'll wander in. The sane response to this is concern. The response Fitzgerald engineers, through his narrator Nick Carraway, is that you'd hand Gatsby the girl yourself. Daisy is married to a brute, Gatsby's devotion is total, and the whole shimmering summer of 1922 seems to exist to get the two of them into the same room.
That the plan is deranged — that Daisy is a person and not a green light, that five years have happened, that there is a child — is something Nick half-knows and the reader half-refuses. Fitzgerald built the book so that your sympathies would outrun your judgement by about a hundred pages, and then he stops the car. It's the great American novel about wanting the wrong thing beautifully, and it's short enough to read in an afternoon, which is about how long the illusion is supposed to last.
You want Gatsby to get Daisy. So did he. Nick tells you in the opening pages that it didn't go well.
Mansfield Park — Jane Austen
Fanny Price is the poor relation, shipped at ten to her rich uncle's house to be grateful, and she grows up timid, principled, physically fragile and in love with her cousin Edmund, who is training for the church. Then the Crawfords arrive from London. Henry is charming, restless and amoral; his sister Mary is witty, worldly and plays the harp. Within a few chapters the household is rehearsing a mildly scandalous play with the Crawfords in the thick of it, and within a volume Henry has decided, purely for sport, to make Fanny fall in love with him — and then, to his own surprise, fallen for her instead.
Every reader roots for the Crawfords. Kingsley Amis famously couldn't stand Fanny, and he was not the first. Mary gets the best lines in the book; Henry gets the most interesting arc; Fanny gets a headache and a moral position. Austen knew exactly what she was doing: she built the temptation to be tempting and then made the novel about whether you'd fall for it, which is precisely the test the characters are sitting. It's her least loved book and her most unsettling, because it catches you preferring charm to goodness, and it doesn't pretend to be surprised.
The right answer is Fanny. Nobody has ever wanted it to be.
Bridget Jones's Diary — Helen Fielding
Bridget is thirty-something, single, working in London publishing and counting alcohol units, cigarettes and calories at the top of every diary entry, and there are two men. Mark Darcy is a human-rights barrister she meets at a New Year's Day turkey curry buffet in a diamond-patterned jumper and bumblebee socks, standing apart, being rude. Daniel Cleaver is her boss, who sends her messages about her skirt. Fielding took the structure straight from Pride and Prejudice and told you so in the surname, which means you know who's who from page one.
It makes no difference. Daniel is funny. Daniel is fun. Daniel's messages are the best thing in the first half, and Fielding writes them so well that for two hundred pages the whole country quietly wanted the cad to turn out to be a decent bloke underneath, against a century and a half of evidence. Mark stands at the edge of parties being right. That's the trick of the book, and it's the same one Austen played: give the wrong man all the sparkle, and see how long the reader can hold out.
You know Darcy is the answer. You backed Cleaver anyway. Everyone did.
Why you keep doing it
Look at what the eleven have in common, because it isn't villainy and it isn't romance. It's that in every one of them the wrong person is the one who wants something, and the right person is mostly there to be wanted around. Fiction runs on appetite. The steady husband, the sensible cousin, the fiancé with the pension: they already have what they want, which makes them furniture, and nobody roots for furniture. Rooting for the wrong person is rooting for the story to keep going. It isn't a flaw in your character. It's evidence you were paying attention.
That's why the list opens with The Twin Flame Game, and it's worth saying plainly why. Keith Myatt is a man with every advantage and no idea what to do with any of them, running the most cynical dating strategy in fiction, and the novel bets that you'll want him to come out of it well regardless. If you'd rather have the same wager played darker, The Soul Bank gives a man a decent life and a better dream, and asks which one you'd back. You already know the answer. So does the book.
So pick one, and pay attention to where your loyalty goes. It won't be where it should.
FAQ
What is the best book where you root for the wrong person?
The canonical answer is The Talented Mr Ripley, because Highsmith puts you so far inside Tom's head that you'll sweat through every knock on the door on his behalf. For the same instinct played for laughs, The Twin Flame Game by Adam Eccles gives you Keith Myatt, a wealthy drifter who turns the idea of a soulmate into a dating strategy and somehow still has you on his side. For the doomed affair, it's Anna Karenina and it always will be.
Is it a bad sign if I always root for the villain in books?
No. It's a sign you're reading properly. Fiction runs on wanting, and the wrong person is almost always the one who wants something most, while the right person is usually standing at the edge of the room being correct. Your sympathy follows the energy, which is exactly what a good novelist is counting on. Thackeray, Austen and Highsmith all built books on that bet and won it. The only thing it says about you is that you were paying attention.
Which of these novels has the most likeable wrong person?
Becky Sharp in Vanity Fair, and it isn't close. She has no money, no family and no scruples, and she's the only person in eight hundred pages with a pulse. The modern equivalent is Keith Myatt in The Twin Flame Game: a hedonist with every advantage, a cynical plan and a habit of telling you the truth about himself, which is a very hard combination to root against.
Are there novels where you root for someone to leave a good relationship?
Several, and they're the most uncomfortable books on the list. The Soul Bank by Adam Eccles gives Andy Clarke a decent life, a girlfriend and a set of dreams about a woman he has never met that feel more real than either, and then quietly asks which one you're backing. Conversations with Friends and Madame Bovary do the same from opposite ends of two centuries, and neither of them lets you off.
Which of these can I read in a weekend?
The Great Gatsby is an afternoon. The Talented Mr Ripley, Conversations with Friends, Bridget Jones's Diary and The Twin Flame Game are each a couple of evenings. Save Vanity Fair and Anna Karenina for a week when you've nothing on, because you'll have nothing on.
Do any of these books let the wrong person win?
Some do, and saying which would ruin them. It's worth knowing that the writers on this list are not on your side about it. Thackeray subtitled his book A Novel Without a Hero. Austen built Mansfield Park so that preferring the Crawfords would feel like failing a test. Fitzgerald let you want Daisy for Gatsby for a hundred pages and then reminded you who she was. Whether the wrong person wins is the least of it. The question every one of these novels is really asking is why you wanted them to.