Book Club: Brit Bennett – The Vanishing Half
Brit Bennett’s The Vanishing Half was published at just the right moment. Adopting the somewhat abandoned trope of a Black protagonist passing for white, Bennett’s second novel examines how and why someone might cross racial barriers. Already faced with such a significant moral, in the contexts surrounding the re-emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement and the election of a new US president, the tensions and politics of Bennett’s novel become all the more important.
I’m currently researching a dissertation that explores the crossing of racial lines in American literature, so Bennett’s novel has, in my eyes, a lot to live up to; writers including Nella Larsen have formed a legacy for the ‘passing for white’ storyline. But Bennett makes it her own. The narrative’s temporal placement helps with this; it spans the 1960s through to the 1980s, supplying a context of contemporary racial and political tensions like the Civil Rights Movement to subtly but succinctly convey contentions between Black and white Americans.
The novel follows Stella and Desiree, fair-skinned identical twins living in a southern Black town who have witnessed their father’s violent lynching by white men. At one point, the novel shifts focus to Desiree, pushing Stella into the periphery until Bennett explains her absence: she has been ‘passing’, living as white.
The ease with which Stella completely cuts herself off from Desiree is, one might argue, somewhat unbelievable. Bennett takes effort to convey the intimacies between the twins in childhood: they dress the same, do everything together, and are each other’s only real friends – why would she suddenly leave?
This, I suppose, is exactly the point. Stella has chosen a white life that offers her a beautiful, wealthy husband, an extravagant house and, most significantly, a young daughter to whom she can offer everything she never had. Had she not chosen to ‘pass,’ this is a life she could only have dreamed of - the direct contrast of Desiree, still living as Black, confirms this. She works in a diner, lives in her mother’s house, and can’t see her daughter, Jude, because she can’t afford to travel out to UCLA.
Bennett’s creation of dichotomy between the lives of these identical sisters powerfully details the tensions arising from race in the America of her novel. Jude finds herself working as a server at an event Stella attends, and though this meeting of the two seems entirely unlikely and too much of a forced coincidence, it triggers the tensions of the novel’s second half – why didn’t Desiree tell Jude about Stella? How has Stella managed to conceal her past? What do these truths mean?
What I feel Bennett’s novel lacks is a closer look at how the revelation of a new racial inheritance impacts Kennedy, Stella’s daughter who knows nothing outside of the ‘white’ life that has been forged for her. Though Bennett does have Kennedy learn of her mother’s truth, she doesn’t examine what this means for her racial identity; given the context of the “one-drop rule” (which denied anyone the identity of ‘white’ if they had any trace of Black blood), this would have been a valuable addition to Bennett’s writing, offering the trope a new facet otherwise ignored by Larsen and her contemporaries.
Regardless of some unlikely elements of plot and the incomplete explorations of certain ideas, The Vanishing Half is a novel I raced through. It is powerful and poignant. The prose is emotional and depicts with care the tensions at work in the society Bennett crafts: a beautiful updated take on a literary tradition too often brushed aside.