‘Vanishing Half’ ponders questions of race, connection
Brit Bennett’s novel explores lives of “colorstruck” twins on different journeys.
Colorism, a bias against people with darker skin from others within the same race, has a fraught and painful history in America. Brit Bennett’s deeply compelling new novel “The Vanishing Half” (Riverhead, 350 pp., ★★★g) goes directly to the heart of this experience by depicting a Southern community born from the legacy of slavery, whose members grapple for generations with what it means to be “colorstruck.”
That’s how Desiree Vignes describes Mallard, the Louisiana town no one outside has heard of, founded by her 19th-century ancestor – a freed man determined to make “a town for men like him, who would never be accepted as white but refused to be treated like Negroes. A third place.”
Growing up in 1960s Mallard with her twin sister Stella, Desiree dreams of escaping the poverty of her home, where her widowed mother takes in cleaning but is barely able to afford food. Soon enough, the teenagers run away together to New Orleans, a city big enough to hide (they hope) the violence of their past and the suffocation of growing up light-skinned in a place where it is valued above all else.
Bennett, whose debut novel “The Mothers” garnered critical acclaim, brilliantly creates a network of characters – singular and vivid – whose stories alternate in time and take readers from Louisiana to LA.
Stella, Desiree’s beloved twin, slips into passing for white, a confounding disappearance that will wrack her family for years to come. Early, a “hunter” who works for a private investigator, nurses a lifelong adoration for Desiree, whose return to Mallard, dark-skinned daughter in tow, electrifies the town. And Jude and Kennedy, the next generation, move into their own futures of medical school and the acting world while trying to come to terms with how their lives have been shaped by Mallard.
There are moments in “The Vanishing Half” that stun with quiet power, such as when a man cares for an older woman who’d hurt him many years before, learning to braid her hair by using pieces of yarn: “He’d practiced, again and again, amazed that his fingers were capable of anything so delicate.” There is a loving, long-term queer partnership that ranks as one of the most realistic and affecting in recent fiction.
As Desiree and Stella travel their separated paths, numerous scenes and relationships of this quality heighten our interest in how the twins might or might not find each other again.
A potential pitfall in a novel with far-flung characters whose lives and decisions affect each other is the perceived need for scenes where startling coincidence brings two people together and reveals their connection. One major example of this pushes the plausibility limit in “The Vanishing Half,” even as it furthers the dramatic action of the novel.
Yet overall, “The Vanishing Half” more than succeeds as a beautifully imagined story about an American family. Whether or not Mallard or a place like it actually ever existed – the novel’s end puts this into question – the lives of Desiree, Stella, and their kin will stay with readers for a long time.