The Vanishing Half, by Brit Bennett
I really enjoyed this book.
It was a fascinating exploration of race, identity, family, and honesty. It had a great cast of nuanced and interesting characters. The plot was so engrossing that I found it quite hard to put down, which resulted in a few rather late nights!
Because of its themes of racism and colourism, it felt like a very appropriate book to be reading in the middle of Black History Month, and it really opened my eyes to some issues concerning race that I had not paid much thought to before. I can see why it was nominated for the Women's Prize for Fiction.
'The Vanishing Half' is about identical twins Desiree and Stella Vignes. They are African-American, but comparatively light-skinned - a fact that becomes crucial to the plot. The girls leave their tiny hometown of Mallard aged sixteen, and from that point onwards their lives diverge. Years later, Desiree is living with her black daughter Jude, back in Mallard. Stella, meanwhile, is living as a white woman with her white husband and white daughter Kennedy, having secretly passed as white and erased everything about her real history.
It's an intriguing and really quite sickening concept. The idea of 'passing over' as white is not something I'm especially familiar with, but it seems it was a fairly well-known phenomenon in 1950s/60s America. The fact that identical twins can end up leading such different lives, with different rights, in different financial positions, with utterly disparate lifestyles, based purely on what colour people think they are, is so saddening.
Bennet has also extended this theme, by introducing the next generation - Stella's daughter Kennedy and Desiree's daughter Jude end up meeting each other. They are characterised completely differently: Kennedy is a jobbing actress, who, when we first meet her, is incredibly stuck up; Jude is humble, studious and conscientious, with a dream of becoming a doctor. Another crucial difference is that Kennedy is white and blonde, while Jude is 'black as tar.' Bennett uses these characters to continue her commentary on the way these people are treated so differently.
But the meeting of Jude and Kennedy is important for the exploration of another theme. Because this book actually goes beyond issues of race - the idea of honesty vs pretence is also key. I think one of the things I found the most compelling about this read was watching Stella's lies inexorably and inevitably catch up with her. The whole life Stella is living is built on a falsehood that she has carefully constructed, and she has come so far concealing her past that not even her husband and daughter know the truth - she has reached a point where the lie has almost become reality, and there is no chance of her giving away her real roots. Until Jude meets Kennedy and reveals that they are cousins, and slowly but surely the falsehoods begin to unravel.
This theme of pretence, performance, and performativity is woven throughout the whole novel, and represented by many of the minor characters. You've got Desiree's love interest, Early, who is a bounty hunter successful because of his ability to act and camouflage himself. There's Kennedy's love interest, Reese, who is transgender, and constantly trying to live in a masculine way whilst searching for surgery. There's Kennedy herself, whose career as an actor requires becoming someone else, so much that at times she forgets her own identity and feels as though she is her character.
When you look closely, you see that this acting is everywhere. All the characters are performing. All the characters are trying to forge their own identity, decide for themselves who they want to be. It's just such a terrible shame that, in this period of history, the whiter you were, the better. And perhaps that's still true now. It shouldn't be. But is it?
Overall, a very thought-provoking novel, with deep and resonant themes balanced with a ripping good storyline!