Vanity Fair

Vanity Fair is a sprawling monstrosity of a book.  It clocks in at something around 750 pages, has a large cast of characters, and goes from London to the countryside and all the way to Waterloo.  In that space, Thackeray takes consistent aim at the various sins and hypocrisies of his society, which admittedly haven't changed so much between his time and ours.

Nobody is spared, and the novel's subtitle "A novel without a hero" is borne out.  I've seen arguments that Dobbin, the good guy of the novel, is actually the hero, but I don't think so.  Dobbin is mostly ineffectual, and is also largely absent for a lot of the novel.  Amelia is sometimes called a "heroine", but, then again, so is Becky, so I don't think we can take that appellation at face value.  Dobbin and Amelia, although good, are too ineffectual to do all the good they can; in the end, it takes Becky's scheming and willingness to blacken George Osborne's character to resolve Amelia's remaining issues with Dobbin.

For the record, this was my second attempt at Vanity Fair; I had tried reading it about 8 years ago, and got stalled out in the long section on how to live on nothing a year.  In these few chapters Thackeray does his best to show us how the Becky Sharps of this world are not merely lovable rogues who don't do any actual harm, but instead how their unpaid bills and defaults drive a lot of the little people into bankruptcy.  It feels to me more angry than the rest of the book, in which Thackeray mostly adopts a sort of amused contempt, as if to say, "Yes, this Vanity Fair of ours is a sordid place, and there's nothing we can do about it."  I found it a difficult read this time as well, and came close to stopping again.