This post is written in a hurry, fueled by the manic energy of the people going places around me and the sugary goodness of the frozen lemonade I am currently slurping. Also, I don’t have anything profound to write about, but I’ve always wanted to write something in a train station, and I am delighted that Union Station has free wireless.
I just finished reading William Makepeace Thackery’s “Vanity Fair” (doesn’t he have the greatest name?), though, so I suppose I could ruminate on that for a few paragraphs. I’m surrounded by our society’s version of vanity fair at the moment–various shops selling high-priced lotions and men’s shoes and jewelry are just around the corner, and at the cafe I’m sitting in, every person has a laptop or Blackberry or iPhone.
“Vanity Fair” was something of a disappointment to me–the characters were wonderfully constructed, and it’s worth reading the book just to get to know the ambitious and accomplished dissembler Becky Sharp and the meek-to-the-point-of-irritating Amelia Sedley. The problem I had with the book was not the philosophy or the morality, but the plot. The plot dragged. Victorian novels aren’t generally known for their snappiness, but this book lacked the Dickensian grotesquerie that makes his padding endurable. This book was just too long, and wrapped itself up too quickly, albeit in an interesting manner. But, due to the drawn-out nature of the novel, Thackery didn’t earn the ending he gave us.
This is an interesting concept–that of an author having to earn the right to write something. Thackery didn’t, with his long-windedness, earn the right to end the novel with the confetti-paper bang he ended “Vanity Fair” with, while Charlotte Bronte’s “Villette” has a similarly quick and bombastic ending, but it feels perfectly natural and allowable.
I think Thackery’s problem was really his narrative voice–the voice becomes almost a character in itself (in fact, the reader is sort-of introduced to the narrator at one point), and it takes over towards the end–too anxious to get the moral across, and ignoring the plot in the meantime. Finding himself at the end of the story suddenly, he quickly gets back to the much more engrossing lives of Becky and Amelia, and sends them dramatically offstage with a pat of poetic justice on each of their heads. The good girl gets the happy marriage and the devoted husband, while the bad girl gets poverty and a ruined reputation, but of course this is a moral tale, so the reader understands that Amelia’s marriage is not exactly a bed of roses, while Becky’s squalor is probably more to her taste, and gives her more creative opportunities, but it is exactly the opposite of what she wanted out of life. If Thackery had let his characters dictate their futures, he would have ended up with a much more compelling ending, and he would have earned the right to it as well.
And now, my train is coming and I must go. Farewell!
books, bottles, and broomsticks 