William Makepeace Thackeray's Vanity Fair should be a mandatory complement to any Jane Austen reading assignment. Focusing on the same social set in the same country and time period as Austen, Thackeray offers a view of the world depicted in Austen's novels that is less romantic, less hopeful and less moral than the perspective Austen proffers. Thackeray is also unrelenting.
I'm a fast reader, and yet Vanity Fair claimed a month of my time. The extended reading period is odd. Without question, I enjoyed the book, and I found Thackeray's authorial voice entertaining. I loved the depth that Thackeray added to my understanding of social dynamics in Britain at the time of Jane Austen. And, as I passed the hours in Thackeray's company, I admired his wit, courage and antics.
But the extent to which I dawdled finishing the book is testament to an inherent flaw: the plot didn't function.
The plot is the engine of a novel. Just like an engine, a book's plot has to rev up to full speed. As the story progresses, plots should gather momentum like a toboggan hurtling downhill. The plot should pull the reader onto the toboggan for the plunge. When the plot functions, a reader should reach a point - somewhere between halfway and three-quarters of the way through - where he or she feels compelled to finish the book. With Vanity Fair, I never felt that compulsion.
A major reason for that failure is Thackeray's unrelenting bitchiness. He is so unsympathetic to his characters that he has disabled the plot in two ways. First, he successfully persuades the reader that the characters in Vanity Fair are not worth caring about. Here, for instance, is Thackeray discoursing about Rebecca Sharp:
Miss Rebecca was not . . . in the lease kind or placable. All the world used her ill, said this young misanthropist, and we may be pretty certain that persons whom all the world treat ill, deserve entirely the treatment they get. The world is a looking-glass, and gives back to every man the reflection of his own face. Frown at it, and it will in turn look sourly upon you; laugh at it and with it, and it is a jolly kind companion . . .This is certain, that if the world neglected Miss Sharp, she never was known to have done a good action in behalf of anybody . . . .(p. 8.) Of course, the world uses ill many good people who drink deeply and undeservedly from the cup of bitterness, but Thackeray early on dismisses any notion that Becky Sharp might belong in that category. Nor is Thackeray satisfied to pass condemnatory judgment on Becky, but he jumps up and down on the point:
And, as we bring our characters forward, I will ask leave, as a man and a brother, not only to introduce the, but occasionally to step down from the platform, and talk about them: if they are good and kindly, to love them and shake them by the hand: if they are silly, to laugh at them confidentially in the reader's sleeve: if they are wicked and heartless, to abuse them in the strongest terms which politeness admits of. Otherwise you might fancy it was I who was sneering at the practice of devotion, which Miss Sharp finds so ridiculous; . . . - whereas the laughter comes from one who has no reverence except for prosperity, and no eye for anything beyond success. Such people there are living and flourishing in the world - Faithless, Hopeless, Charityless: let us have at them, dear friends, with might and main.(pp. 70-71) "[L]et us have at them . . . with might and main"?! When an author recommends to his reader that he or she treat the protagonist thus, what can a reader do but comply? And since Thackerey harangued me into not liking - and therefore not caring about - his characters, I never became invested in the resolution of their stories.
Second, Thackeray seems to have gotten so carried away being nasty to his characters that he neglected to plot adequately for them. For example, when William Dobbin wakes up his commander, Mick O'Dowd, in the middle of the night and demands leave so that Dobbin can attend to a personal matter in England (i.e., Amelia Smedley's allegedly impending marriage), Dobbin's urgency generates momentum that Thackeray completely dissipates by failing to follow through on Dobbin's story line for more than a hundred pages.
Similarly, after Becky's disgrace with Lord Steyne, she falls so thoroughly out of society that the end of the book can have no suspense with respect to her plot line: rehabilitation is impossible. A compulsive drinker and gambler, living in flophouses, chased away and stumbling from city in city in Europe, Becky has neither the means nor the motivation to restore her reputation. Thackeray has utterly gutted her plot possibilities both by casting her so low and by giving her a meager living from her ex-husband, Rawdon Crawley. A woman with a regular income may wish the income were higher, but if she can survive on it, she'll adjust to it - which is what Becky does. (By the same token, Thackeray ruins Becky's relationship with her son so early in the book that, by the end, when young Rawdon inherits the family money and title, reconciliation is unthinkable - yet another plot possibility for Becky eliminated.)
Thackeray's plotting misadventure is interesting and surprising because, as an author, he's self-aware (and voluble) on the topic of effective story telling, authorial motive and pacing. Here he is, for example, on all three topics:
I have heard a brother of the story-telling trade, at Naples, preaching to a pack of good-for-nothing honest lazy fellows by the sea-shore, work himself up into such a rage and passion with some of the villains whose wicked deeds he was describing and inventing, that the audience could not resist it; and they and the poet together would burst out into a roar of oaths and execrations against the fictitious monster of the tale, so that the hat went round, and the bajocchi tumbled into it, in the midst of a perfect storm of sympathy.(p. 70). And, yet, "sincere" Thackeray's storytelling and pacing did not generate the momentum of Thackeray's "mercenary" brother in Naples. Whether the problem was that, in his enthusiasm for demonstrating his "sincerity," Thackeray went overboard - or whether Thackeray simply enjoys being bitchy too much to resist when necessary for the sake of the plot - the outcome was the same. Bitchiness can be diverting over the course of an evening - but after a month, it gets old.
At the little Paris theatres, on the other hand, you will not only hear the people yelling out, "Ah gredin! Ah monstre!" and cursing the tyrant of the play from the boxes; but the actors themselves positively refuse to play the wicked parts, such as those of the infames Anglais, brutal Cossacks, and what not, and prefer to appear at a smaller salary, in their real characters as loyal Frenchmen. I set the two stories one against the other, so that you may see that it is not from mere mercenary motives that the present performer is desirous to show up and trounce his villains; but because he has a sincere hatred of them, which he cannot keep down, and which must find a vent in suitable abuse and bad language.
I warn my "kyind friends," then, that I am going to tell a story of harrowing villany and complicated - but, as I trust, intensely interesting - crime. My rascals are no milk-and-water rascals, I promise you. When we come to the proper places we won't spare fine language - No, no! But when we are going over the quiet country we must perforce be calm. A tempest in a slop-basin is absurd. We will reserve that sort of thing for the mighty ocean and the lonely midnight. The present Chapter is very mild. Others - But we will not anticipate those.
(Image of William Makepeace Thackeray from The Free Library)
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