Title: The Vanishing Half Author: Brit Bennett
Published: June 2, 2020
Genre(s): Literary Fiction
Page Count: 343
Rating:
Summary from Goodreads:The Vignes twin sisters will always be identical. But after growing up together in a small, southern black community and running away at age sixteen, it's not just the shape of their daily lives that is different as adults, it's everything: their families, their communities, their racial identities. Many years later, one sister lives with her black daughter in the same southern town she once tried to escape. The other secretly passes for white, and her white husband knows nothing of her past. Still, even separated by so many miles and just as many lies, the fates of the twins remain intertwined. What will happen to the next generation, when their own daughters' storylines intersect?
Weaving together multiple strands and generations of this family, from the Deep South to California, from the 1950s to the 1990s, Brit Bennett produces a story that is at once a riveting, emotional family story and a brilliant exploration of the American history of passing. Looking well beyond issues of race, The Vanishing Half considers the lasting influence of the past as it shapes a person's decisions, desires, and expectations, and explores some of the multiple reasons and realms in which people sometimes feel pulled to live as something other than their origins.
Sharp yet also intimate, Brit Bennett’s The Vanishing Half is an intricate story about families, secrets, and identity. This is a multigenerational story that, rather than sprawling across hundreds of pages and years, seems to distill itself into only what is most essential: a confrontation outside a dingy Los Angeles theater; two women watching their daughters play in the park; twins separated by choices neither is quite willing to regret. Yet this nearly episodic style of storytelling does not feel incomplete: Bennett does not allow her characters to hide from her readers as they do from each other. This family portrait is uncomfortable, but ultimately…hopeful?
This is, I think, widely regarded as the best book of 2020. Or at least, it’s certainly the book that has been counted among the best most often. The accolades are deserved. Bennett is able to create rich characters with complicated histories, and then to set those characters into the context of society’s larger themes: colorism, classism, intergenerational trauma, respectability politics, the definition of “family.” All at once, this is a novel about two sisters—one who chose to be white, and one who didn’t—and also a story about the million ways this world picks apart those who don’t stay in “their place.” And whether that supposed place you’ve strayed from is among “Black people” (race is an interesting concept) or inside a particular zipcode or within a particular concept of gender, we see how hard it is to eke out happiness when the world isn’t built for you to succeed.
At its core, of course, this is a story about the twins, Stella and Desiree, the choices they make, and the daughters they give birth to. It’s a family story! (she says flippantly). But in the same way that families are messy and hurtful and impossible to describe—much less understand—so too is this book. Even the best family is an absolutely incomprehensible mess of emotions and shared memories and obligations and well-timed jabs. How could I possibly describe a “family story” when I don’t even know how to articulate the concept of “family” itself to my own satisfaction?
When you married someone, you promised to love every person he would be. He promised to love every person she had been. And here they were, still trying, even though the past and the future were both mysteries.
Sometimes, I read books for pure, silly fun. (This year, I’ve mostly read those kinds of books.) But the stories that I vividly remember, years down the line, are usually ones like The Vanishing Half. These are books that capture the intricacy of humans, that study why people make choices that seem to only cause misery to themselves and to others. I hope that this will prove to be a novel that is timely, but also timeless. I know that next year, we will have all moved on to the newest, shiniest literary achievements (myself included)—but I hope that in the not-too-distant future, people still read this and think about what Brit Bennett has to say.
