Among Brit Bennett’s gifts as a writer is her control of narrative time. The opening sentence of her second novel covers decades, compressing her story about identical twins whose divergent lives reflect the consequences of racism in the US. It also includes a close-up of a character eager to share big news. Intimate and expansive, gripping and carefully crafted, the single, mesmerising sentence hints at what’s to come.
The Vanishing Half spans the 1950s to the 1990s. It is resolutely non-linear as it tracks Stella and Desiree, who grow up in Mallard, a small black town in rural Louisiana. As children the twins witness their father being lynched by white men. At 16 they run away together. Stella abandons Desiree, and years later they inhabit different worlds.
Escaping an abusive marriage, Desiree returns home with her daughter and gets a job in the local diner. Stella passes for white, marries her white boss and moves to Beverly Hills, having severed contact with her family. Her daughter, who has blond hair and blue eyes, doesn’t realise she has been “given whiteness” until – in one of the novel’s Shakespearean coincidences – her cousin arrives into her life, forcing her to question who she is.
Mallard is highly symbolic, reminiscent of the quasi-mythical town of Ruby in Toni Morrison's novel Paradise
The novel is broader in scope than Bennett’s debut novel, The Mothers, an urgent and accomplished coming-of-age story set in the writer’s native southern California. But the books are similarly nuanced in how they explore their central subjects – abortion in The Mothers, passing in The Vanishing Half. Both depict community as oppressive and comforting at once; the judgmental chorus of church women interjecting The Mothers has a counterpart in Mallard.
“More idea than place,” Mallard is an insular, “colourstruck” community where light skin is prized and “nobody married dark”. Its founder – an ancestor of Stella and Desiree – inherited sugar cane fields from the father “who’d once owned him”. Rooted in slavery and freedom, Mallard is highly symbolic, reminiscent of the quasi-mythical town of Ruby in Toni Morrison’s novel Paradise.
Multiple narratives
Bennett’s flair for multiple narratives, her powerful depiction of trauma and focus on how the past continues to reverberate, also bring Morrison to mind. Desiree “married the darkest man she could find”, and when she brings her daughter Jude home is considered more prodigal than ever. Jude is bullied, stigmatised and isolated in Mallard. She’s called “Tar Baby”, the title of Morrison’s 1981 novel.
The story of “passing” in America has long since interested writers and filmmakers, though in passing narratives from the first half of the 20th century, the character who passes is often punished. In tracing the fallout from Stella’s secret, Bennett avoids cliche and melodrama. Stella tells herself that she became white “because it was practical”. Living as white, she tries to prevent a black family from moving into her estate. She befriends the family despite herself but then initiates a smear campaign that forces them out.
Trauma is intergenerational. The sisters pass on emotions and repressed memories to their children
Rather than judging Stella, Bennett scrutinises her, using passing as a prism through which to examine the impact of racism and colourism on individual and collective identities. It also allows her to expose white privilege and the futility of self-serving white guilt. “You want to go feel good about feelin bad, you can go on and do it right across the street,” Stella’s neighbour tells her.
There is more than one form of passing in the novel. Jude’s boyfriend is a trans man. Jude meets him in the late 1970s, and Bennett subtly contrasts his situation with Stella’s. Each is at risk if their secret is discovered, but Stella is more ambivalent about the past. Years after she abandons Desiree, she still thinks of herself as a twin above all else.
Trauma is intergenerational. The sisters pass on emotions and repressed memories to their children. Stella’s daughter has nightmares about the lynching. Jude inherits her mother’s longing for Desiree.
Mirror motif
The Vanishing Half is concerned with how identity is constructed, performed, interpreted and rejected as well as how it’s experienced as a felt sense. Mirrors are a motif. Characters are caught looking in mirrors. They look at each other in mirrors. There’s a blackened mirror, a vanity mirror, a hall of mirrors, a mirror that reflects a drag queen’s half made-up face. Early on a mirror turns the twins into quadruplets – “four identical girls fussing with their hair”. Later their mother sees the multiplicity of people her daughters have been through the mirror of her dementia.
Bennett is an excellent storyteller, though some of her secondary characters – a white academic blind to how white and middle class her version of feminism is – are overshadowed by the plot and can feel like plants. But the novel is driven by the intelligence and agility of her writing, which is tender without being sentimental, and stark when it needs to be. The violence is indelible, the twins’ complicated bond beautifully real.
