There are parts of your identity that you are told, but others that you can go and make for yourself. That's the fascinating thing about identity: that it's yours, and hopefully that it stays that way for the rest of your life. The fluidity of identity is also necessary if one wants to have a great life, because it'll reflect that you're listening to yourself as you change and grow. Identity is imperative in The Vanishing Half, as the women grapple with their racial, sexual, and familial identities. Not only is this book thought-provoking, but it is pure genius, compassionate, and heart-warming and heart-breaking all at the same time. A book claimed as the book of the summer, I think this book is perfect for the fall - grab a blanket and sit by the fire with The Vanishing Half - I promise you'll stay up all night reading it, trying to guess what happens next for the Vignes women and their daughters.
Brit Bennett is the author of the bestselling novel The Mothers, a finalist for the NBCC John Leonard Prize for the best first book, the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction, and the New York Public Library Young Lions Award. One of the National Book Foundation's 5 Under 35 honorees, she has seen her work featured in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The Paris Review, and Jezebel.
Twins, inseperable as children, ultimately choose to live in two very different worlds: one black and one white. The Vignes 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, including their racial identities. Many years later, one sister lives with her black daughter in the southern town she once tried to escape. Across the country, the other secretly passes for white, and her white husband knows nothing of her past. Still, although separated by so many miles and just as many lies, the fates of the twins remain intertwined. What will happen when their own daughters' story lines intersect? Weaving together multiple strands and generations, from the Deep South to California, from the 1950s to the 1990s, The Vanishing Half is at once a riveting, emotional family story and a brilliant exploration of race, gender, and identity, and the lasting influence of the past as it shapes a person's desires and expectations.
One of my favorite things to analyze when reading is how time moves throughout a story. At the beginning of The Vanishing Half, we are tossed into this very complicated story from the get-go, and have to learn a lot about Mallard and the two Vignes twins who inhabit it. At first, I can hardly keep Stella and Desiree apart on the page, which I think was cleverly done. The movement through time was a little tricky at first, switching back and forth between when Stella and Desiree lived in Mallard vs. the future when they obviously don't even know one another. But, after the initial exposition, we get the hang of how the story flows. I love how each section of the novel focuses on a different character, and it usually alternates between a mother (Stella or Desiree) and then their daughter (Kennedy or Jude, respectively) until the stories converge near the middle and end. When we dive into Stella's, Desiree's, and Jude's stories, I loved the amount of detail we had. I can picture Jude's apartment with Reese, or Desiree's bedroom, or Stella's wedding with Blake vividly because of the detail in which Bennett used to depict these moments and places. Bennett pulls us deeply into these women's lives, has us understand them so intimately that it's almost shocking that the book is in third-person and not first. I love how time at the beginning goes by quick, and then it slows down a lot in the middle so that we have the time to learn these women, and then it speeds up once the stories converge because we know something is going to have to happen between all of them. Brit Bennett wrote a masterpiece with The Vanishing Half, and I truly enjoyed how she built it all during specific moments in time and also with an overarching and important longer story.
Reese was one of my favorite characters while reading this. Stella, Desiree, Kennedy, and Jude are all interesting in how they grapple with their races, but Reese's story has the extra layer of also grappling with another part of his identity. Bennett told Reese's story with an abundance of candor, and I could see the care in which she took to really bring Reese and his story to life. There was a clear dedication to bringing the lives of hidden people onto the page through Reese, and it opened my eyes to the ways people lived during the time in which Reese was deciding to run away and become who he was. This story deals a lot with identity, mostly in relation to race and family, and I loved how Reese added the new angle on sexuality as an important and imperative part of one's journey to themselves. Another part about Reese that I loved was how there were no labels tossed around by anybody. There was just a clear acceptance and a moving forward of how to make that the most fully possible for Reese. Barry does give Reese the language he needs to talk about himself, but the lack of labels was important, in my opinion, in the way the story was told. It was the lack of labels and the abundance of candor that made Reese stand out to me the most.
The story of Stella and Desiree, and then the stories of their daughters, takes place in specific time periods, and important turning points in history. Yet, there's something completely timeless about this book, as if you don't really have to pay attention to the dates if you don't want to. Of course, knowing the relevant time periods makes the stories more shocking, or more thought-provoking, especially if one can recognize the specific "large news events" that take place. Nonetheless, the only things pointing us to the historical time are the dates at the beginning of each section, and some of the large news events that are still mostly vague enough to be applied to any point in time. The genius of this decision is what makes The Vanishing Half both timeless and timely. It allows readers to truly dive into this moments in time by learning how Stella, Desiree, Jude and Kennedy live, yet also allows us to apply their experiences to the world we live in today. I think this speaks overall to the story's lessons or takeaways relevancies. It is so, so easy to dismiss historical fiction as something we don't need to learn from because it already happened, but with The Vanishing Half, I have a strange feeling that the timelines of race, sisterhood, and lies will remain with me for a long time.
(The following paragraph contains spoilers for the end of the novel.) Readers are working up towards the moment when Jude and Kennedy meet, and root for Jude as she tries to discover who her family is. I like that mission of Jude's, to understand and to meet Stella and to learn her story. What's even more fascinating is when Kennedy finds out. Stella has spent her entire life keeping Kennedy and her husband from finding out the truth, but once Kennedy knows, she acts just like Jude - she's unable to stop thinking about it, has trouble going to sleep sometimes. The point where all four stories converge is intriguing, because we've been working up towards it and yet we have no idea how anyone is going to react to it. The end is honestly heartbreaking, in my opinion. Stella recognizes her past to her daughter and it is implied that she's going to tell Kennedy everything. Yet, Stella will never be going back home after the death of her mom - so she'll never see Desiree again. Even Desiree and Kennedy have these secret phone calls that they would never tell their mothers about, knowing what they do about Stella's secrecy and Desiree's moving on. It's so fascinating to see how people hurt other people, and how other people try to build bridges over that hurt, and yet a culmination of decisions is what's truly keeping them apart. This book deserves all of the praise it has received, but definitely the one of "thought-provoking" because there's so many ways one could tease out the ending of this book and analyze it. And I really do think that's beautiful and a testament to Bennett's writing.
Brit Bennet is also the author of the bestselling novel The Mothers. If you're interested in reading more of her work, find Brit at britbennett.com.
*This review can also be found on my Goodreads page*
Comments
Post a Comment