The Vanishing Half
By Brit Bennett
ISBN: 9780525536291 | 2020
Twin sisters. Two different paths. One chooses black. The other white…
Racism and bias still pollute America four centuries after the first African slaves were brought to its shores, and it questions about the past, and how it affects the present, which Brit Bennett tackles in her book, The Vanishing Half. Spanning 40 years from the 1950s to the 1990s, this multi-layered and thought-provoking novel is simply dazzling.
Twins Stella and Desiree Vigne are raised in Mallard, Louisiana. It’s a tiny town with a fascinating history, and inhabited by mostly light-skinned black people “who would never be accepted as white but refused to be treated like Negroes.” The sisters are inseparable, although Desiree is confident and headstrong, and Stella is bookish and shy. Both have witnessed atrocities inflicted upon their family at a young age, and they are troubled by personal and collective traumas. At 16, they flee to New Orleans hoping to reinvent themselves, but more than a decade later, they have lost touch with each other.
Desiree has returned to Mallard with a black daughter, while Stella, passing for white, ends up in Los Angeles, living a privileged life that’s shrouded in secrecy. One of the most painful scenes in this novel is of Stella publicly protesting the new black family moving into her white neighborhood.
As time goes on, the sisters’ respective daughters grow up in the 1970s. They are a new generation, the first to break through the restraints of their mothers’ past. However, like their mothers, they are completely opposite. Jude, Desiree’s daughter, is shy and ashamed of her appearance. She goes to UCLA on an athletic scholarship and begins a new life. She falls in love with a trans man who suffered at the hands of his family and community for simply being himself. Transgender passing, like racial passing, in this novel, has its pros and cons. Stella’s daughter is Kennedy Sanders. She is blond with eyes “so blue they looked violet.” Outspoken, she uses the n-word as a youngster, goes on academic probation as a teenager, and drops out of college to become an actress. Her romantic life is made up of many men, most of them married. Through Stella and Desiree’s choices, Bennett contrasts race, gender, class, and sexuality and she doesn’t simplify the consequences of Stella and Desiree’s choices. She complicates them instead to expose the convoluted hierarchies of American culture and society.
Brit Bennett’s debut novel The Mothers was published in the fall of 2016, and critics and readers were astounded by this exciting new voice. The Vanishing Half will undoubtedly establish her as one of the country’s finest writers of literary fiction.
Cary Knapp is a librarian at College of Coastal Georgia.
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