Maybe a Masterpiece

Image scanned by Gerald Ajam

Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray
London ; New York : Penguin Books, 2001.
xl, 866 p. : ill. ; 20 cm.

This should really go under my "summer break" reads, but I only finished it this weekend - so here it is as an fall semester post. As you can see from the page count (866!) it is a bit of a long book.  I had been wanting to read Vanity Fair for some time, and since summer is a good time to take on a thick book, Vanity Fair was on my list.

I found it fairly enjoyable and an interesting read.  It is hard not to be entertained by the pretenses, schemes, dishonesty and greed that infects the cast of characters from various classes of mid-19th century English society that are the subjects of Thackeray's novel.  He has a rather cynical and sarcastic tone throughout much of his work - in some ways closer to a satirist, than a straight novelist. 

The book wouldn't be the success it is without two characters in particular - the shrewd and scheming Rebecca Sharp - and the long-suffering lover, William Dobbin.  Rebecca, or Becky as she is more commonly called, has nasty character flaws - duplicity, appalling mothering, and scorn and ridicule for those she pretends to care about - but the reader can't help but appreciate her intelligence, cunning, and resourcefulness (and realize that she is no worse than the majority of characters that people Vanity Fair). 

Dobbin, as the introduction points out, is surely modeled after the author himself - who, like the character, endured unrequited love for years of his life, enamored of an already married woman.  Dobbin really is the only truly redeeming character in the book and serves as a foil to the many scoundrels populating the novel.

In the introduction to the book, John Carey argues that Vanity Fair is as great a masterpiece as Tolstoy's War and Peace.  I'm doubtful.  It's been more than ten years since I read War and Peace, but only two years since I read Anna Karenina, and I really don't think Thackeray's work is on par with Tolstoy.  I agree that it comes close at times, but Thackeray's general misanthropy and caustic view of humanity ends up depriving Vanity Fair of the pathos needed to overwhelm the reader, the way Tolstoy does.  Nevertheless, Vanity Fair is a remarkable work of fiction, and I would recommend it to any student asking for a recommendation from the classics of English fiction.