My Big Fat Summer Reading: Vanity Fair

Last summer, it was Middlemarch. This year, I'm having a go at William Makepeace Thackeray's Vanity Fair. My annual way-too-long novel read has begun!

I was inspired to read Vanity Fair for two reasons: 1) Vanity Fair, the movie.

Actually, I've never seen it, even though it came out seven years ago. I make it a point to never watch a movie about a book that I might someday want to read. I get the actors' faces in my brain and I can never get them out again, which shapes the way I visualize the characters forever and ever and ever. I was afraid that I'd watch the film and never get Reese Witherspoon out of my version of Becky Sharp again. So, basically, I couldn't watch the movie (which looked really, really tempting) on Netflix until I committed to the novel.

And 2) I came across this awesome The Hairpin article about great classic novels with mean female main characters. It was funny and clever and totally convinced me that Thackeray was worth tackling. (Carrie Hill Wilner also wrote an article that convinced me to read Charlotte Bronte's Villette, which I totally enjoyed. So she's pretty much batting a thousand at this point!)

Anyway, a long jaunt through 19th-century England felt like exactly what I was looking for this June, and, so far, it has been! The novel is rife with earnest yearning and satire, innocence and deceit, creditors and debtors, outrageous wealth and the illusion of outrageous wealth. I sort of love Becky Sharp for all her shallow, back-stabbing, social-climbing ways--she's so good at what she does that it's difficult not to admire her. She's selfish and sometimes cruel, yes, but she's also doggedly clawing her way up in the world in the only way available to her, and her savvy and determination are remarkable.

But I also love her tender-hearted, naive, helpless best frienemy Amelia Sedley. In fact, I think that Thackeray is a great novelist precisely because he makes it possible for me to love both characters. Though the novel is known as a biting work of satire, I think that, at its heart, it's also a book written with a lot of empathy, understanding, and even gentleness.

I'm about 580 pages into its 800+ pages, and I'm on a pretty good tear (now that I'm past that really dull stretch about the battle of Waterloo--sheesh!).

 In fact, the only thing I don't like about Vanity Fair's length is that I have a huge stack of library books on my kitchen table that I desperately want to get to. There's Lord of the Flies and Howard's End and Wives and Daughters and Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad (which is my new book club's first read!). I'm definitely looking forward to the last forth of Vanity Fair, but I have so many treats in store--it's looking to be a great summer so far!