The Vignes twins vanished on August 14, 1954, right after the Founder’s Day dance, which, everyone realized later, had been their plan all along.
I was really looking forward to The Vanishing Half, both due to enthusiastic friend reviews and from what I understood of the concept as outlined in the book’s blurb: Twin sisters, raised in a southern all-African-American town known for the self-perpetuating lightness of its residents’ skin, run away first to New Orleans and then from each other — one sister marrying a dark-skinned man and eventually returning to their home town with a scandalously “blue-black” daughter, the other deciding to “pass as white” and disappearing into that mysterious world. I thought I would read a thoughtful examination of racism (including colourism within the Black community), self-formed identity, and family ties that bind and break, and while most of that is gestured at, nothing really went deep enough for me. Author Brit Bennett has a very smooth and engaging writing style — I was entranced at the beginning and it’s probably the dashing of these heightened initial expectations that leaves me somewhat disappointed — but while Stella’s story of passing into the white world was thought-provoking and tense, no one else’s storyline felt nearly as important or credible. This isn’t the book I was expecting, and while that’s not Brit Bennett’s fault, I can’t help but feel a bit let down. (Some spoilers beyond.)
The passe blanc were a mystery. You could never meet one who’d passed over undetected, the same way you’d never know someone who successfully faked her own death; the act could only be successful if no one ever discovered it was a ruse. Desiree only knew the failures: the ones who’d gotten homesick, or caught, or tired of pretending. But for all Desiree knew, Stella had lived white for half her life now, and maybe acting for that long ceased to be acting altogether. Maybe pretending to be white eventually made it so.
Stella’s story is fascinating: Haunted by her father’s lynching and keeping experiences of abuse to herself, after successfully passing as a white woman in New Orleans in order to get a good job, she eventually runs away from her twin, Desiree, in order to join the white world — and its perceived safety — completely. Afraid that another Black person might guess her secret, Stella finds herself posing as the worst kind of racist to keep distance from people of colour, and as profoundly lonely as it makes her, Stella spends her life hiding from her family and denying their existence to her husband and daughter. I believed everything — psychologically and plot wise — that happens in Stella’s thread. But that’s about it.
After Stella leaves New Orleans, Desiree drifts until she marries a handsome and successful man — nothing in their story makes it seem as though she perversely went out to find the darkest man she could in order to buck her hometown’s penchant for “marrying light” — but when her marriage doesn’t work out, Desiree returns to Mallard with her daughter, Jude, and accepts a life of working poverty (when in D.C. she had worked for the FBI) in order to raise Jude in an insular community that would never accept a girl with such dark skin. Other than reuniting with her widowed mother, I could see no reason for Desiree to return to Mallard.
The timeline moves forward and back, and we eventually join Jude as she escapes to college in California on a Track scholarship, and nearly immediately, she falls in love with a trans man, Reese. With the major theme of The Vanishing Half seeming to centre on identity as a matter of self-invention, I was kind of offended by the offered equivalence between a Black woman choosing to pose as white (something she did not believe herself to be) and a trans man choosing to live as his authentic self (not to mention the fact that the character of Reese makes it look incredibly simple for a person in the 1970s to have bound his breasts, scored black market testosterone from bodybuilders on the beach, and then successfully “pass” and be accepted as fully male by everyone he meets). This theme of self-invention is further muddied with drag queens, an actress who states, more than once, that she invents a new life every time she goes on stage, and later as a real estate agent, that she invents a new life every time she offers a home to a buyer. This theme worked with Stella, but for me, it felt strained with any other character. (Even Desiree’s long term boyfriend, Early, was given to an Aunt and Uncle to raise as a child and he — a successful bounty hunter in adult life — could never again find his own parents; also, Desiree and Stella's mother eventually gets Alzheimer's and confuses the daughter who returned with the one who stayed away, and it all eventually felt like Bennett throwing ideas about identity at a wall to see what would stick.)
I did really like Bennett’s writing style but the frequent aphorisms began to wear on me:
• You could drown in two inches of water. Maybe grief was the same.
• There were many ways to be alienated from someone, few to actually belong.
• The hardest part about becoming someone else was deciding to. The rest was only logistics.
Gratitude only emphasized the depth of your lack...Only white folks got the freedom to hate home...You can escape a town, but you cannot escape blood… It might be peevish to balk at wisdom, but these sparkly nuggets kept bringing me out of the story; and I wanted more story. Again: I was truly struck by Stella’s tale, but no other character affected me emotionally; no other storyline felt credible to me. Still happy to have met Stella.
