In the summer of 2024, burning with anger about my place in Hollywood, where I felt I was treated as a diversity project, not as someone with credible talent, I chose Vanity Fair By William Makepeace Thackeray.
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I picked it up because of the cover, which depicted a British aristocrat falling down a staircase. As they fall, their clothes rise up revealing their lower parts. They begin to disassemble the ladder; They end up with it as a depressing mass of pale animal flesh.
I felt this image reflected my own anger. Those people falling down the stairs seemed to me like Hollywood hypocrites, largely white elites who boast of their own self-worth while maintaining a system that is fundamentally unfair. I was clearly projecting.
Actually, subtitles Vanity Fair is “a novel without a hero”.
i started reading Vanity Fair That day. The book begins with a preface where Thackeray writes: “There is a great deal of eating and drinking, loving and swooning, laughing and its opposite, smoking, cheating, fighting, dancing and frolicking.” And for the next 800 or so pages, Vanity Fair actually gallops through a maddening plot, detailing the collusion of a hustler, Becky Sharp, and the parallel misfortunes of her extremely sweet colleague, Amelia Sedley, who is mostly helpless and does nothing to improve her increasingly unfortunate situation. The aim is clearly to make Becky more interesting to the reader. For 800 pages, Becky colludes while Amelia sighs. Becky is poor, Amelia is rich.
In the end, Becky falls and Amelia gets up. But, the author emphasizes that there is no heroine in this novel. Actually, subtitles Vanity Fair is “a novel without a hero”.
the day i started studying Vanity FairI started writing the sump. I didn’t have any outline or plot in mind. I was just adapting this 200-year-old book. I wrote modern Becky Sharp as Raj, an Indian actor, a poor stubborn hustler trying to navigate an elite Hollywood society. He is also a simp in the vernacular of young people.
There is no hero in his novel, because there is no hero among the rich, lifeless aristocrats who enjoy every advantage for no reason.
At the time I began writing my novel, Hollywood was beginning to lose interest in diversity. But I did not want to write about a martyred minority who is the helpless victim of a cruel industry. In other words, I didn’t want to write Amelia. This would have deprived Raj of its humanity—and made it boring. Becky never does a single sympathetic thing Vanity Fair. But she is the ultimate victim of a rigid class-system that seeks to abandon an art teacher’s daughter who has no money or title. Her complicity is a direct result of his oppression which is very quietly the point of the book.
I also wrote Raj in the same way because I feel like I could be Becky too. Being a minority in Hollywood doesn’t make me a straight-up victim or an instantly good person. But minorities are not entitled to equality in Hollywood because they are good people – as far as I know, they are no better than white people. Why does writing like this feel so dangerous? Because the stories we tell require minorities to be innocent, which deprives them of interiority. The gentle caution shown to us is actually poisoned condescension.
In fact, I, like Becky, have spent many years running around in Hollywood, sometimes in questionable ways. For example, I started my career as a medical consultant, even though I didn’t actually attend medical school for more than a few weeks; I told them I was a doctor. But who cares about moral rigor when the system has broken down? This is a question that interested Thackeray greatly. He apparently finds British high society deeply repulsive. There is no hero in his novel, because there is no hero among the rich, lifeless aristocrats who enjoy every advantage for no reason. And where is this more true than in Hollywood today? People who are successful are not necessarily successful because of their talent. Given the abundance of Nepo babies, they are often born just like the elite.
Inspired by this idea, relentless as Becky was, I moved forward in lockstep Vanity Fair. Every day, I read 30 pages of the book and write 3000 words of my book. Three weeks later, I read the last page of Vanity Fair That’s the day I wrote its last page the sump.
As I drafted, I wrote in a style I had never written before, a memorably sarcastic voice. Vanity Fair. Here, for example, Thackeray is describing a character named Jemima: “Honest Jemima had all the bills, and washing, and mending, and puddings, and plates and crockery, and servants for the superintendent. But why speak of her? It is possible we shall not hear of her again from this moment to the end.” And this flippant, disrespectful narrator is right – we never hear of Honest Jemima again. I also told Raj’s story in the same tone. In other words, I didn’t write out of anger (even though that’s just how I felt). I wrote as if it was all a comedy, just like the picture of the white elite falling down a staircase.
I think a lot of people worry that the classics are boring, which is probably why I don’t know anyone else who read Vanity Fair. It’s actually much less boring than contemporary literary fiction because it tells a surprisingly fast-paced story and never stops to describe anything. For example, here is the only description of Amelia in the book: “Since she is not the heroine, there is no need to describe her personality.” This was the spontaneous style of pre-Flaubert fiction of the 19th century, also found in Dickens, Balzac, and Austen. At one time, literary fiction was merely a very good story and not as juicy and sensual as Flaubert and Proust later made it. Early 19th century readers did not want to wade through atmospheric descriptions. The writers moved quickly and produced network television-like cliffhangers before commercial breaks.
Today this style is not considered very distinctive. Elite fiction (and elite cinema) is meticulously cool, unaffected and bloodless. It is abundant in the environment. There’s an air of embarrassment around the plot – you’re not supposed to do a menial job like spin a good yarn, which almost seems like a low-class job to do. Elite high art is aloof, restrained, and minimally narrative; The low art is seedy and plot-y.
Vanity Fair The art is low—it’s straight-up melodrama—but it survives because it’s a good story. I wanted the same low quality for The Simp, which is very narrative. If this were high art by modern standards, much less would have happened and Raj Amelia, simply charming, would have fallen victim to cruel people. What is so big about this?
Later, after feverishly dreaming up the first draft, I read more about Thackeray. I learned that he was born in all places in India. His parents were part of the growing Anglo-Indian community, white British people of lower class origin (except the aristocracy) who made their fortunes by plundering colonized countries. They were victims of a system in which there was no social mobility and so they became violators of others with even less mobility.
Thackeray, who may or may not have been innocent of these crimes himself, made a career of satirizing how the rich lived. He was six feet three inches tall, addicted to food (as he said) and often, it seems, a hypocrite, which is probably why he wrote of them so well.
I found that very appropriate. Thackeray was a charismatic writer—he might have been Becky, too. Raj is also like this. And I may be a Becky who has been the victim of a cruel industry because of her race and who has sometimes profited from it, even if that profit has been out of condescension. In Vanity Fair Thackeray does justice to the astonishing complexity that hierarchy creates. He writes novels that we understand intuitively because it resembles our own lives – it is a novel without a hero.
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the sump By Roshan Sethi available at Simon & Schuster.
