The Satire and Style ofVanity Fair is as Relevant as Ever

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.

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.

In the end, Becky falls and Amelia rises. But, the author stresses, there is no heroine in this novel. Indeed, the subtitle to Vanity Fair is “A Novel Without a Hero.”

The day after I started reading Vanity Fair, I started writing The Simp. I had no outline or plot in mind. I was simply adapting this 200 year old book. I wrote the modern Becky Sharp as Raj, an Indian actor, an impoverished inveterate hustler trying to navigate an elite Hollywood society. He is also, in the vernacular of young people, a Simp.

There is no Hero in his novel, because there’s no Hero among the rich, lifeless elite who enjoy every advantage for no reason at all.

At the time I started writing my novel, Hollywood was beginning to give up on its interest in diversity. But I did not want to write about a martyr minority who is the helpless victim of a cruel Industry. I did not, in other words, want to write an Amelia. That would have deprived Raj of humanity, and it would’ve been boring. Becky never does a single sympathetic thing in Vanity Fair. But she is the biggest victim of a rigid class-system that wants to discard the daughter of an art teacher who has no money or title. Her connivances are the direct result of her oppression which is very quietly the point of the book.

I also wrote Raj that way because I think I might also be a Becky. Being a minority in Hollywood does not make me a straightforward victim or an instantly good person. But minorities don’t deserve equity in Hollywood because they’re good people, they’re not any better than white people, as far as I know. Why does it feel so dangerous to write that? Because the stories we tell require that minorities be blameless, which deprives them of interiority. The tender caution shown to us is actually venom-tipped condescension.

In fact, I’ve spent years hustling through Hollywood like Becky in sometimes suspicious ways. For example, I started my career as a medical consultant even though I hadn’t actually done more than a few weeks of medical school; I told them I was a doctor. But who cares about moral rigor when the system is busted? That’s a question Thackeray is very interested in. He clearly finds British high society deeply venal. There is no Hero in his novel, because there’s no Hero among the rich, lifeless elite who enjoy every advantage for no reason at all. And where is that more true today than in Hollywood? The people who succeed do not necessarily succeed because of their talent. Judging from the preponderance of Nepo Babies, they are often born into it, just like the aristocracy.

Fueled by this idea, as relentless as Becky, I proceeded in lockstep with Vanity Fair. Every day, I read 30 pages of the book and wrote 3000 words of my own book. Three weeks later, I read the last page of Vanity Fair on the same day I wrote the last page of The Simp.

As I drafted, I wrote in a style I’ve never attempted before, the memorably satirical voice of Vanity Fair. Here, for example, is Thackeray describing a character named Jemima: “Honest Jemima had all the bills, and the washing, and the mending, and the puddings, and the plate and crockery, and the servants to superintend. But why speak about her? It is probable that we shall not hear of her again from this moment to the end of time.” And this flippant, irreverent narrator is right, we never hear of Honest Jemima again. I told the story of Raj in the same tone. I didn’t, in other words, write in anger (even though that’s all I felt). I wrote as if it was all a comedy, just like the picture of white elites tumbling down a staircase.

I think a lot of people worry the Classics are boring, which is probably why I don’t know anyone else who has read Vanity Fair. It’s actually much less boring than a lot of contemporary literary fiction because it tells a bewilderingly fast-paced story and never stops to describe anything at all. For example, here is the only description of Amelia in the book: “As she is not a heroine, there is no need to describe her person.” This was the breezy style of pre-Flaubert 19th century fiction, found also in Dickens, Balzac and Austen. At one point, literary fiction was simply a ragingly good story and not as lush and sensualist as Flaubert and Proust later made it. The early 19th century reader did not want to wade through atmospheric descriptions. Writers moved fast, constructing cliffhangers like network television before the commercial break.

Today, this style is not considered very elite. Elite fiction (and elite cinema) is carefully cool, disaffected and bloodless. It abounds in atmosphere. There’s a whiff of embarrassment around plot, you must not do anything so squalid as spinning a good yarn, which feels almost like a low-class thing to do. Elite high art is aloof, restrained and minimally narrative; low art is seamy and plot-y.

Vanity Fair is low art, it’s a straight-up melodrama, but has survived because it’s a good story. I wanted the same low qualities for The Simp, which is very narrative. If it was High Art by modern standards, a lot less would happen and Raj would be Amelia, simperingly winsome, the victim of cruel people. What’s so High about that?

Later, after my fever dream of a first draft, I read more about Thackeray. I discovered he was born in, of all places, India. His parents were part of the growing Anglo-Indian community, white British people of low class origins (excluded by the Aristocracy) who made their fortunes by pillaging colonized countries. They were victims of a system with no social mobility and they therefore became transgressors of others with even less mobility.

Thackeray, who may or may not be innocent of these crimes himself, made a career of satirizing the rich while living like them. He was six foot three, addicted to eating and drinking (“gutting and gorging,” as he said) and often, it seems, a hypocrite which is probably why he wrote them so well.

I found that very fitting. Thackeray was a miracle of a writer, he was also maybe a Becky. So is Raj. And I’m a maybe-Becky who has been the victim of a cruel Industry because of his race and who has also occasionally profited from it, even if that profit was undergirded by condescension. In Vanity Fair Thackeray does justice to the bewildering complexity that hierarchy creates. He writes the novel we understand instinctively because it resembles our own lives, it’s a novel without a hero.

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The Simp by Roshan Sethi is available from Simon and Schuster.