The Vanishing Half

In The Vanishing Half, Mallard, Louisiana is a town where the people are “Negroes” and yet look as white as the white people who both loathe and are perplexed by them. And in Mallard, the Vignes girls are twins, and minor celebrities as descendants of the town’s founder, a man who created the place as a refuge for those Negroes who looked white and could, if they so chose, “pass over” and live their lives as white. But that is the puzzle of Mallard and of colorism in general — most of these folks don’t want to be white, they don’t however want to be Black-Black either. The two Vignes girls, Stella and Desiree, at the age of sixteen run off to New Orleans escaping the stifling expectations of Mallard and their mother’s declining fortunes which has her cleaning the houses of white women just to get by after her husband’s death.

One sister, Desiree, chooses to live her life as the Black woman she is, the other vanishes without warning into life as a white woman, leaving her Blackness and her twin sister behind. The effect and consequences of this, both emotionally and intergenerationally are the crux of this novel. I found it a painful read, because of the portrayal of what Black people lost and the compromises they made to gain the benefits that came from proximity to whiteness. I especially liked reading about Jude, Desiree’s “blue-black” daughter who suffers when her mother returns with her to Mallard, enduring the casual cruelties of her almost-white peers, and the confusing aggression from boys who desire her but are taught to hate her and themselves for doing so. They victimize Jude but are themselves victims of a society that values whiteness and closeness to it. Jude’s experience as a dark-skinned girl and then woman is the flip side of her mother’s experience with Jude’s father, a man much darker than her who both loved and loathed his wife’s lightness.

I waited and was eager for Brit Bennet’s sophomore novel because something about ‘The Mothers’ moved me, though I’m still not sure what. I can only imagine that it was the way she writes about identity, and not just racial identity though this book is definitely about that, but also about literally being uncomfortable in your own skin (and all the permutations that takes). She also writes in this novel, as she did in her first, stirringly about motherhood, and about notions of home and the urge to return, even when home may have been a place that caused you pain. But central to this novel, I think, may be the idea of loss. Maybe that’s why Brit Bennett’s work leaves me so moody. Moody, but never feeling incomplete. I recommend.

This was a different and interesting novel. The characters were well drawn and the story unfolded at a great pace. The more you read,
the more you really had to wonder just how it was going to end.

This book about Black twins, one of whom disappears to pass as white, is a beautifully written story that also educates about the Black experience in America and raises lots of questions for thought and discussion.

Loved it…so sad… I will be happy when the color of our skin has nothing to do
With being a good human .. informative

Liked the story.

This book turned out to be better than I thought. At first it was hard to get into but I think that was because I was expecting something totally different. Once I really got into it, it was much better than I thought. Held my interest and I actually began to care about the characters. Really good read. Planning to read more from this author.

Wonderful writing and interesting point of view. The writer is very articulate and the story is absorbing. It stays with you.

I thank Little Brown Book, UK for providing me an ARC copy of this novel in the first place, although later I also purchased my own copy which I review here.
This is the first novel by Brit Bennett I read, although I’m aware that her first novel, The Mothers, was very well-received, and this one has been highly praised and regarded as well. And, in my opinion, it deserves it.
The description of the book provides a fairly accurate summary of the main points of the plot, and I won’t try to be too inclusive when I mention the many topics the author touches on: race is paramount (is race only skin-deep?, different types of racism, the changing attitudes over the years, the burden of internalising other people’s values and what that does to the characters’ sense of self…), identity (while one of the characters lives a lie, a trans man abandons his birth biological gender to truly become himself), domestic violence, family, LGTB, rural versus city life, the importance of education, mothers and daughters, Alzheimer’s disease, love… It is a family saga, a story of two twin sisters and their daughters and how their lives split up at some point, sending them into completely different directions.
I’ve mentioned the issue of race, and that is the main focus of the book. The little place, somewhere in Louisiana, where the sisters are born is peculiar already when it comes to race. Although all the inhabitants are African-American, they are all so light that an outsider would not be able to tell they are not white. They are proud of it and consider anybody who is a shade darker than they are their inferior. But, of course, the local white people know, and that has terrible consequences for the girls, who lose their father due to a lynching (for an imagined crime the man had not committed). It’s not surprising that they leave the place as soon as they can, but once in New Orleans things are quite difficult, and one of the sisters, Stella, ends up passing for white to get a job. That changes everything, and the sisters’ lives end up going in totally different directions. Although from the reviews I read I realised that many readers might be unfamiliar with the concept of ‘passing’, it has appeared in novels and even movies over the years. I recommend Nella Larssen, a female author from the Harlem Renaissance, whose novels Passing and Quicksand are fascinating and deserve to be better known, but both movie versions of Imitation of Life, although in a far more melodramatic fashion, deal with the topic as well, and in the musical Showboat we have similar concerns (and talk of miscegenation and the ‘one drop of blood’ dictum), and concepts that might appear bizarre now (like quadroon, octoroon, [Alexandre Dumas Jr was an octoroon if we apply that classification, and Alexandre Dumas father a quadroon], or high yellow) but made a big difference in the past, when it came to the treatment somebody received. Some of the readers don’t feel the book goes into these issues deeply enough, but this is a novel, and realistically, it would be impossible to discuss all the aspects of it and create a fictional story readers cared for as well.
The main characters of the novel are the two sisters, Stella and Desiree, and their two daughters, Kennedy and Jude. While the two sisters are identical twins, Kennedy and Jude could not look and be more different —Kennedy is blonde, has blue eyes, has lived a life of privilege, and has always been self-centred. Jude is dark skinned, suffered prejudice and abuse as a child and grew up without a father, is hard-working and determined, and has always cared for her family and for others— but their lives still converge and collide at times, bringing some momentous changes to their lives. There are many more characters in the story, some more important than others (Early plays an essential role in Desiree’s life, and Reese complements Jude), and there are many people they come across: friends (I particularly liked Barry, who becomes a drag queen on the weekends and is a great agony aunt), neighbours, work colleagues… The first two parts of the novel centre mostly on Desiree and her daughter, while we only get to know more about Stella and Kennedy later in the book. While the central characters are well drawn, that is not the case for some of the others, and they are not all sympathetic, not even the protagonists, but I felt the author manages to make their actions and their emotions understandable, even if we don’t like them that much. I wasn’t totally sure about the way Reese’s experiences are dealt with in the book. We hear about his difficulties and his process as a trans man, but this at times feels like an afterthought, and some readers have questioned how his story might appear to be linked to the concept of ‘passing’, although I don’t think that was the author’s intention (he sheds his previous identity and is happy to leave it behind, with no regrets, no matter how hard the practicalities are, while Stella struggles and feels she is living a lie).
The story is narrated in the third person, mostly from the point of view of the four female protagonists, although we are also given a brief insight into some of the other characters that come into the sisters’ lives, and we hear a bit more about Early and Reese’s thoughts and experiences. The way the story is told might be problematic for many readers, as the point of view often changes within a chapter, and although the changes are not excessively difficult to follow, keeping the story straight does require a degree of attention, especially because the chronology is not linear either. We go forwards and backwards in time, from the 1950s to the 1990s, although the story moves forward overall.
The writing is lyrical and precious at times, harsh at others, and the rhythm flows and ebbs, being quite contemplative in parts (as it befits a book about memory and identity). This is not a page-turner, but I felt the pace suited the novel perfectly. I had to share a few highlights with you, although I recommend that people interested in the book check a sample to make first, to ensure it works for them.
In New Orleans, Stella split in two. She didn’t notice it at first because she’d been two people her whole life: she was herself and she was Desiree. The twins, beautiful and rare, were never called the girls, only the twins, as if it were a formal title. She’d always thought of herself as part of this pair, but in New Orleans, she splintered into a new woman altogether after she got fired from Dixie Laundry.
The hardest part about becoming someone else was deciding to. The rest was only logistics.
Sometimes you could understand why Stella passed over. Who didn’t dream of leaving herself behind and starting over as someone new? But how could she kill the people who’d loved her? How could she leave the people who still longed for her, years later, and never even look back?
The ending is perhaps a bit rushed, considering the length and depth of the novel, but it suits it and I enjoyed it. If you want to know if it’s a happy ending… Well, this is not that kind of book, but I’ll say it isn’t unhappy.
I recommend this book to people who enjoy literary fiction and novels that deal in complex and diverse topics, with a focus on female protagonists and their lives, who don’t mind a somewhat demanding and challenging writing style, and who are eager to discover talented female writers. Great story, memorable characters, and a subject that will make readers think. What else could anybody want?

4.8

I loved this but I wanted MORE!!!
Part 1 of Vanishing Half I found to be slow but once I got to Jude’s story in Part 2 I was hooked. I feel like this is one of those books that I’m going to think about months and even years from now. It was written incredibly well and I loved how the relationship between twins was portrayed. A lot resonated with me and I felt connected to the characters. I’m not unhappy with the ending but I wish she had given me a few more chapters. I wasn’t ready for it to be over.

I loved this wonderful book. At one level, it’s a gorgeously written tale of family relationships and the different paths individuals take from the same beginnings. On another, it explores personal experiences of identity through race, colourism, gender, privilege and the emotional impact of staying or breaking away. I would love to read more about so many of the characters.