In the summer of 2024, burning with anger about my place in Hollywood, where I felt I was regarded as a diversity project and not a person with believable talent, I picked up Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray.Article continues after advertisement
I picked it up because of the cover, which showed the British Aristocracy tumbling down a staircase. As they tumble, their clothes rise up about them revealing their under-parts. They begin the staircase distinguished; they end it as a hopeless mass of pale animal flesh.
I felt the image reflected my own anger. Those people tumbling down the staircase looked to me like the hypocrites of Hollywood, the largely-white elite who have a pompous sense of their own self-worth while maintaining a system that is fundamentally unfair. I was obviously projecting.
Indeed, the subtitle to Vanity Fair is “A Novel Without a Hero.”
I started reading Vanity Fair that day. The book begins with a foreword where Thackeray writes: “There is a great quantity of eating and drinking, making love and jilting, laughing and the contrary, smoking, cheating, fighting, dancing and fiddling.” And for the next 800 or so pages, Vanity Fair cheerfully races through a truly deranged plot, describing the connivances of a hustler, Becky Sharp, and the parallel misfortunes of her simperingly sweet associate, Amelia Sedley, who is mostly helpless and does nothing to improve her increasingly unfortunate situation. The reader is clearly meant to find Becky more interesting. For 800 pages, Becky connives while Amelia sighs. Becky is poor, Amelia is rich.
