Writers who don't love their characters : Lucky Jim

I've thought for a while that, in one way or another, all authors love their characters. One review said of Exiles that he loved the story but hated the characters, and that cut me right to the bone - I'd rather it were the other way around, if I had to choose - because I loved the characters, with all their flaws. They're part of me - how can they not be? This issue came up in recent discussion of Flannery O'Connor, with her gallery of grotesques - and I'm sure she loved every one of them, even though on some level they're not meant to be realistic characters but symbols or emblems of deeper truth. What about Kingsley Amis? I think here, with the British writers of academic sendups, we're getting close to the edge of that truth. Amis, in "Lucky Jim," wrote what's considered to be one of the classic academic novels, and the protagonists, mainly Dixon (so far), a history professor on the rise, are cynical, immoral, they hate their jobs, they hate their students, they're fiercely competitive for the smallest stakes, they devote their lives to a narrow niche of scholarship that even they find boring and wasteful. Funny, yes at times - but worth the effort? Academic satires are too plentiful and too easy. There's a tone in these novels, or at least in this one, in which the author holds his own characters in contempt - he's smarter, hipper, born with the same talents but braver and in pursuit of something true and real (literature) and not fake and trivial (pedantry). Yes, it's a first novel by someone who had long career, but it established a tone of smug cynicism that's still around, faintly echoed by some of the British "laddie" lit of today, including perhaps the early works of Amis fils.