The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett
Mallard is an inconsequential, unnoticed town in Louisiana. It is a black neighbourhood but hereditary factors have led to it being filled with some of the lightest skinned blacks in America. This leads to a form of inverted snobbery with dark skinned blacks looked down upon and ostracised by the light majority. Fair skin is no protection from the usual, casual brutalities of the racist south in the late 50s as the Vignes family discover when the father of the family is dragged from his house and eventually killed for some mistaken slight by a gang of white racists.
Somehow his widow carries on to provide a stable home for his twin daughters Desiree and Stella. By the time they are sixteen, though, stability seems boring and they leave abruptly and secretly for the lure of New Orleans. Fourteen years later Desiree, bolder and more restless than her calm, poised twin, returns home out of the blue. Her mother’s joy is tempered by the fact that she brings with her a very dark-skinned child, Jude. She is fleeing marriage to her successful, educated lawyer husband who turned out to have depths of angry aggression that are imprinted on her bruised cheekbone.
Desiree not only brings back to Mallard a child stigmatised in that community because of her skin colour but also a disturbing story about Stella. Several years previously she had simply stepped away from her twin and the new life they had made for themselves in order to remake her life again. At first, Desiree expected her to return when the pain of separation would become too great. Yet eventually she understands that Stella has gone for good particularly when she finds out that her twin is now ‘passing’ – using her light skin to live her life as a white woman.
That is the set up in the first few pages for this story about identity and whether or not one can escape the limitations or opportunities that are often forced on us or we force on ourselves. Of course, colour is a huge limiting factor and we eventually learn that Stella’s passing was an act based on her need for security - no surprise there having witnessed what happened to her father. Yet the opportunities provided by her marriage to a successful, wealthy white husband trap her. She has to constantly lie to her daughter, Kennedy, who senses something wrong in her unwillingness to discuss her dead family and childhood. She is constantly anxious about being discovered or giving herself away by her inability to relate to the privileged ‘Stepford Wives’ in the exclusive residential estate where she lives. Her security and comfortable lifestyle come at a great personal cost.
That security eventually comes under threat when Jude, now a college student with a part time job in catering sees Stella by chance when she is serving drinks at a swanky party. This leads her to seek out Kennedy’s company in order to find out more about her mysterious disappeared aunt.
I won’t say more about what comes of Jude’s sleuthing; and as you can see the book is quite open about using coincidence and contrivance in order to pursue its larger themes. That did not bother me, however, because these larger themes around issues of identity and social division were handled in a convincing manner with no pat or sentimental tying up of loose ends.
The characters were the reason for the success of this story. Not all of them, though: the twins’ mother was a crucial presence but under-developed and although the male characters had three dimensional characteristics and motivations, their stories were not given enough space to breathe. However, the twins and their daughters were excellently presented, and the book is as much about mother and daughter relationships as it was about race and the constant conflict between rootedness and a desire to escape.
This is the third or fourth American novel that I have enjoyed reading recently. I chose this book and the others deliberately because of the strange phase that this great country is going through at the moment – the still unresolved legacy of slavery; the idiocy of a democratic system that can produce such a grotesque leader as Trump; the cultural wars taking place, particularly on campuses across the country; and the subconscious sense Americans must have that their time as the dominant world power is coming to an inevitable end.
And I chose these novels because I know that American writers have always been braver than British writers about tackling ‘big’ contemporary issues head on in their fiction. Of course, that can often lead to state of the nation fireworks that lack reflection and perspective. The gain though comes from that sense of a nation conversing with itself through fiction about urgent, relevant matters. That is certainly the case with this book which uses its central conceit to explore how we all construct identities for ourselves to navigate life’s stormy seas. It just so happens that Stella’s decision to pass as white strikes the reader for all its difficulties as a reasonable decision to avoid being drowned by those seas.