Vicious

“Vicious was vicious. It was too bad that my hate for him was dipped in a thin shell of something that felt like love.”

Emilia reflects on the proximity between love and hate, which she sees not as opposites but as two different manifestations of passion. This logic underpins the trajectory of the bully romance. This understanding helps Emilia reframe Vicious’s actions during their adolescence as originating in obsession, not uncomplicated cruelty.

“She was going to stay small and insignificant. Uneducated and opportunity-less. And above all—mine.”

Teenage Vicious is willing to damage Emilia’s prospects in order to keep her reliant on him. This controlling behavior is characterized by the text as obsession, not love. When Vicious, at the end of the novel, refuses to ask Emilia to damage her career prospects and instead risks his own, it serves as an inversion of this controlling desire. This indicates that Vicious’s change is legitimate and that his love for Emilia is genuine.

“That was the thing about California, and that’s why I would never leave. I loved everything other people hated about it. The liars, the pretenders, the masks, and the plastic. I loved how people cared about what was in your pocket and not your fucking chest.”

The novel plays with The Difference Between Appearance and Reality. Vicious, in particular, likes the ability to hide behind appearances, though he ultimately learns that his father and Jo are more skilled at this game than he is. The novel does not frame this artificial quality as inherently negative; he and Emilia return to California, portrayed as a bastion of artifice, at the end of the text for their “happily ever after.”

“He had slicked-back blond hair, studied film-making at NYU, lived in Williamsburg, and dressed like Woody Allen. Anything to disguise the fact he was actually from South Carolina.”

Though the novel focuses largely on stereotyped differences between California and New York, various characters also demonstrate regional elitism, believing that all other parts of the US are inferior to a handful of wealthy, coastal cities. This connects to the novel’s exploration of class prejudice.

“Lawyers had the potential to make the best criminals. That was a fact. The only thing that separated me from being an outlaw was opportunity.”

Vicious enjoys thinking of his legal career as proximate to criminality. To Vicious, this is another element of the way he likes to play with appearances and reality, and it demonstrates his flexible sense of morality. Here, he recognizes that a less privileged version of him might have been a criminal rather than a lawyer, showing that he is at least sometimes aware of social inequality.

“My sister had cystic fibrosis. Some diseases are silent. But cystic fibrosis? It was also invisible.”

Rosie’s cystic fibrosis contributes to the LeBlanc sisters’ financial hardship; when Rosie is unwell, she cannot work but still needs expensive medication. While Emilia does not complain about helping her sister, her acknowledgment here that cystic fibrosis is “silent” and “invisible” suggests that she and Rosie have faced challenges when others could not perceive Rosie’s illness.

“My life was hard, but not bad. There was a difference between the two. A hard life equaled a life full of obstacles and challenging moments but also full of people you loved and cared about. A bad life equaled an empty life. One that wasn’t necessarily hard or challenging but was devoid of the people you loved or cared about.”

Though Vicious disparages Emilia for her relative poverty, Emilia recognizes that a lack of money is not the defining feature in what she considers a “bad life.” Emilia’s abiding conviction that her life is good despite its challenges indicates that she sees money as a tool, not as an indicator of one’s self-worth. The more Vicious can access this way of thinking, the more he escapes the trap of Money as a Source of Identity.

“I was at war with myself, but deep down, I knew that the money was going to win this time around. It wasn’t about greed. It was about survival. I couldn’t afford my pride. And my pride, unlike the money, wouldn’t be able to feed me, to pay for Rosie’s medication, and to make sure our electricity was still on next month.”

Emilia is consistently pragmatic about money. Here, she uses the metaphor of war to describe her inner conflict as she sacrifices pride—which she later comes to understand more as self-protection—to support her financial needs. Emilia comes to value this self-protection more highly as her feelings for Vicious deepen. Her sense of what she can afford thus shifts, as she decides that the cost of her own heartbreak is too high.

“She. Was. Getting. Old. She was getting old, while my mother remained young. My mother, Marie, only thirty-five at her death. With hair as black as night and skin white as a dove.”

While Vicious discusses how he likes the image-focused culture of Southern California, his appreciation for appearances over reality is not as all-consuming as it is for his stepmother, Jo. Jo’s sense of self is structured around her surface desires, such as her ability to look perpetually young and beautiful. While this youth and beauty led her to her wealthy husband, who chose Jo over his wife (who was older and had a disability), living where Marie died means that Jo no longer holds this supposed victory over her would-be rival.

“But the HotHoles and I, we’d had our fair share of shortcuts, what with the ability to invest millions of family dollars in our business from the very first year. Wealth attracted more wealth. And with Jamie, Dean, and me putting ten million dollars in FHH back when we founded the company, we saw a return quicker than the average.”

Vicious understands that his business success is not solely a matter of his ability but one of his privilege. Being conversant in the advantages of privilege is presented as a generational issue rather than a class-based one; Vicious and Emilia both understand that wealth is a matter of good luck, not goodness, while Jo and Emilia’s mother both see a person’s wealth as a signifier of their quality.

“Vicious might have advanced me part of my obscenely large salary, but we still needed to be careful with our money. Very much so. Despite the contract he’d made me sign, I didn’t know how long I’d last as his employee.”

Emilia sees her windfall from beginning to work with Vicious as a temporary reprieve from her financial situation. This highlights a difference between sustainable wealth and being able to afford one’s immediate costs; even with a high-paying job, Emilia accesses this second category only. That this influx of money does not solve all of Emilia’s problems highlights the novel’s skepticism about money bringing happiness.

“But I’d humor [my mother], reading Little Women and Wuthering Heights for her aloud. Needless to say, they weren’t my style.

But that smile…her smile was definitely worth the hassle.”

Vicious’s disinterest in Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women or Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights alludes to the longstanding characterization of these novels as exclusively of interest to girls and women. His disinterest thus contributes to his highly masculinized characterization, while his willingness to read them to his mother anyway illustrates his ability to love—a quality that many suspect that Vicious lacks.

“Mama admired the rich. It’s something Rosie and I were never on board with. Maybe because we had the misfortunate [sic] of attending All Saints High and tasting the disdain and snobbery of wealthy students. The bitterness stayed in our mouths long after we’d left Todos Santos.”

Emilia and Rosie react differently to extreme wealth than their parents. Here, Emilia presents this difference as a matter of context. While the LeBlancs work for—and therefore theoretically toward—wealth and the wealthy, Emilia and Rosie encounter the ultra-rich in a situation in which they are ostensibly peers but in which they still are treated as lesser than the rich kids of Todos Santos. They therefore see class difference as more difficult to transcend than do their parents.

“It was almost impossible to consider the idea that a guy like him could be the victim of abuse. Had it actually happened? Was any of it true?”

Emilia shows herself susceptible to narratives that suggest that only people who fit certain profiles can be subject to abuse. This aligns with her understanding of Vicious as a bully figure who had the power in their interactions. As their relationship becomes more equal, Emilia is increasingly able to understand that Vicious did not hold the power in all his relationships and that his experiences are more complex than she previously understood.

“I didn’t know what was right and what was wrong. I just knew the lines between the two blurred when it came to him.”

Moral ambiguity is a key feature of the bully romance. In Vicious, both Emilia and Vicious shift their moral standpoint. Vicious learns that seeking revenge is not a fulfilling primary objective, while Emilia embraces that some situations require morally ambivalent actions, such as lying to Jo to make her believe that she’s at risk of incarceration if she troubles Vicious further. The novel presents both these shifts as beneficial, indicating that moral purity is not a useful method for approaching a morally complex world. Instead, the lines between right and wrong are persistently unclear, and Emilia’s ability to recognize this “blurriness” reflects a logical comprehension of the world around her.

“What the hell did you think was going to happen? She’s hot. She’s nice. She’s fucking kind. Of course guys noticed. I noticed too.”

Dean’s observation about Emilia’s qualities indicates a hierarchy of the things he likes in her; while he praises her personality, he praises her appearance first, something that is consistent with his characterization as being promiscuous as an adult. He further contrasts niceness with kindness, indicating that Emilia’s interpersonal generosity is something that he sees as profound (as evoked by kindness) as opposed to surface level (as evoked by niceness).

“Yeah, the Spencer men were lawyers by training, and they liked women…but they fucking loved money.”

Vicious discusses his father in this excerpt; Baron Sr.’s admiration of money over love has led to the shallowness of his relationship with his wife, Jo. Vicious’s desire to undermine his father’s legacy is therefore accomplished most profoundly in the instances where he makes significant financial sacrifices to show his affection for Emilia—a gesture that she recognizes as meaningful to him, despite her own relative disinterest in money as anything other than a tool.

“It was a mistake of epic proportions, I knew that. And just like any huge mistake, payback was going to be painful. Sadly, it was a price I was willing to pay.”

As the novel continues, both protagonists begin to look at the emotional costs of things rather than their financial cost. For Emilia, this ability to weigh the cost to herself illustrates a form of personal growth. Being able to look out for her own interests—and sometimes deciding, with clear eyes, to prioritize desire over self-protection—acts as a form of agency for Emilia that regulates the previously imbalanced power differential between herself and Vicious.

“He looked too good to be so evil.”

While Vicious finds the difference between appearance and reality to be an appealing way for him to control his life, Emilia finds such differences disorienting. She learns, as she grows closer to Vicious, to see that appearances are more complex, but she desires to see the whole truth of Vicious, not merely his “good” veneer.

“By the time I started having sex, my skin was already so stained with Daryl’s abuse, I couldn’t bear it. The shame. The weakness it conveyed. Letting her fingers run freely against the bumpy scars was like giving up something that was completely mine.”

When Vicious and Emilia have sex, it is the first time he ever does so with his shirt off. Previously, he avoided the emotional intimacy that would come from revealing his scars and therefore his history of abuse. Letting Emilia see the parts of him that he wishes to hide ends up providing Vicious with a sense of reassurance, as she does not treat his past as something that designates him as weak, as he fears.

“I knew he didn’t care about money. Lucky bastard.”

Vicious envies his uncle Alistair for not caring about money, showing that despite himself, he is unable to stop thinking of money as a source of identity. When he nearly loses Emilia’s affection forever, however, he learns that money matters less to him than he felt previously, something that brings him greater happiness.

“I saw [that Emilia had] already contacted a recruitment agency to have another PA on standby in case Dean or I needed someone next week. Honestly, even that annoyed me. She was clearly pissed at me, and she couldn’t even do that all the way without making sure everyone around her was nice and comfortable. Me included.”

Here, Vicious notes an instance in which he feels that Emilia’s care for others goes too far; even after she believes him to have betrayed her, she confirms that his business will not be affected by her absence. The way that Vicious notes Emilia’s kindness as potentially excessive plays into the way the novel questions presumptions about goodness, kindness, and morality—and when the wholehearted adoption of these qualities might not be suitable for a morally complex world.

“Water mattresses floated on the surface of the massive pool like weightless ballerinas, different colors, shapes and sizes, and it all reminded me of a Bret Easton Ellis book. The rich assholes. The bitchy stepmom. It was all so fucked up.”

Vicious alludes to Bret Easton Ellis, an American author best known for his novels American Psycho and Less Than Zero. Ellis’s fiction critiques cultures of overconsumption and the vapidness of the wealthy; with this allusion, Vicious indicates how he sees Jo and her life in Todos Santos as all surface and no substance.