Rawr Reader,
It's both troubling and tragic when the only reason you finish a book is because it's a loan from the library and the due date is fast approaching. I am half-ashamed, half-grateful. How else am I going to be getting any reading done? As of late I've been watching Schitt's Creek, every day easily overlooking the books on my desk for the TV remote.
On a positive note: Happy Earth Day!
The synopsis for The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett is provided by Goodreads, my main source for all things books and recommendations.
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.
Reference:
This was all over Instagram last year and not only was it nominated for the Goodreads 2020 Choice Awards under the Historical Fiction category—but won. Considering I'd started several other winners from the GR 2020 Awards, I should've had expectations on how this would pan out.
Review:
Passing is a facet of storytelling I rarely come across, so when I kept hearing raving reviews about this novel on Instagram and Goodreads I was eager to see how story of the Vignes twins would unfold.
As a personal preference, multi-generational stories are not necessarily for me. Walking in a book store if I pick up a novel and it says a story spanning three generations, I almost immediately put the book back. I did read Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China by Jung Chang in college and really enjoyed it, however for some reason those stories don't pop in my to be read pile.
The Vanishing Half covers two generations and over the course of twenty to thirty years. Before I go onto the reasons why this didn't appeal to me, I will say that highlighting the years our Vignes twins leave home at sixteen to their middle-aged years—and the breadth of that time (twenties and thirties especially) which is still a time for reflecting and discovering who someone is—is the heart of this novel. To be more specific, each twin discovering who they are and who they want to be, as women, as women of color—even passing, and as a twin but growing to live on their own.
To be frank, Desiree's part of the novel didn't make me enthusiastic to continue reading. I had this book on loan from the library for three weeks and I was stuck in Desiree's chapter for a good two thirds of it. I found Desiree as a character had little ambition—which I understand due to certain circumstances that happen between leaving Mallard when she was sixteen and returning a decade later (spoiler 2), however as being the twin we first meet and who would set the stage for the novel, she seemed the least interesting of the four major characters.
We follow her to Jude, more interesting and more driven than her mother, who takes us from a small southern town to Los Angeles at the age of eighteen. She meets Reese, a trans man, and they fall in love almost at first sight. The potential relationship/ friendship/ whatever-was-about-to-transpire had me until this ease, the lovey dovey eye fluttering reliance on one another. For a novel set in the seventies, I didn't believe that a relationship involving a black woman and a white trans man would play out so easily. Their story isn't the focus of the novel and they had bumps along the road, but any real challenges they faced were usually resolved over a matter of days and the challenges seemed less momentous and almost inconsequential, like they didn't need to be mentioned in the overarching story of how the black daughter of a passing woman lived her life.
A small tangent off of that, I know that for the amount of words or pages allowed to the author Reese's and Jude's story couldn't go longer than it did, I just felt there wasn't much more for the reader than to prove Jude's loyalty to her boyfriend in helping him transition. I think Jude should have had more of her chapters interacting with her cousin. Personally I felt introducing a trans person was more of an accessory than an independent contribution to the story.
Where did the book pick up? With our lost Vignes twin, the one for a good amount of time I wasn't so sure we would ever meet. (But meet we did! The synopsis would've been misleading if we hadn't.) An opposite personality from her sister, Stella's story is tragic. Being more of a reserved person myself, I empathized with Stella's reluctance to share with anyone hurts from her youth, even with someone as close as her sister. Hurts from her past transformed her when Desiree and Stella decided to run away from their hometown, and with the added shield of passing, she had the fortunate ability to become someone new.
It's with Stella that we see passing in action. It gets her a job. It finds her a beau then eventually a husband, who uproots them to an upscale life she never imagined for herself in her small hometown. However her husband doesn't know she's black, and this is a secret she carries for years. She shed her old life and the connections of her past for a life where she is both safe and yet constantly afraid the truth of her heritage will somehow find her.
The parallels can't be ignored. They are vivid yet subtle in their interweaving. Desiree the outgoing twin, Stella the quiet one. Desiree marries a black man, Stella a white man. Their children are images of their fathers, yet their characters reflect their aunts. Jude is confident and hardworking, yet reserved due to the nature of her childhood and growing up in a town of black people where her darker skin is undesirable. Then we have Kennedy who is white, privileged, and outspoken. I guess from there she becomes more like her mother, throwing away opportunities to manifest what her mother has designed through her upbringing, a person who will wear a mask and make their way through life being another person.
Desiree falls to the background, remaining in Louisiana's small town, however Stella is almost always present, due to Kennedy's direct connection to her or Jude's thoughts on learning anything on her estranged aunt. It was fine with me because Stella was the one who was taking on a role and living by that role like her life depended on it. Which it did. Constantly I waited for other shoe to drop. (Spoiler 1)
Of all the characters Stella was the most complex. However her capricious thoughts and actions, swaying one way to the other was infuriating. Characters need to be consistent, and I couldn't be sure at first if it was meant to show Stella as this erratic, paranoid character or if it was the author not delivering her onto the page as she should. I would come to find it was the latter, when the same thing would happen to other characters like throughout scenes from Jude's POV then to Kennedy's, all the scenes concerning the other and how the two women wanted to meet/speak with the other but then didn't. After a couple pages of this and the capriciousness expanding from one to three of the main characters, I cared less about Stella finding the courage to return to her hometown and reunite with her family and more about finishing the book.
To be brief, I found the ending unsatisfactory and left me with more questions. (Spoiler 3). It isn't every day I find a novel where the beginning and end are less interesting and the middle would be what kept me going. Funny right?
Overall, what I felt wasn't working was time placement. Although stated at the beginning of sections what decade the following chapters would be taken place, I felt this was a more contemporary read then one set in the sixties/seventies/eighties. It fell under the umbrella of not enough conflict from outside sources, or having historical events described in greater details, but I didn't believe the story was set when it said it was. And considering the subject matter is of race, I would've thought the events unfolding between the characters would be more external and impactful.
I give this book 3.5/5 stars.
Quote:
"As they grew, they no longer seemed like one body split in two, but two bodies poured into one, each pulling it her own way."
"At night, Desiree held her daughter and told her stories about her own childhood. At first she said, I have a sister named Stella, then, you have an aunt, then once upon a time, a girl named Stella lived here."
-The Vanishing Half, Brit Bennett
My Goodreads:
Next To Read:
The Midnight Library by Matt Haig
Spoilers:
I wasn't reticent about finding the characters to be unreliable and inconsistent, most notably Stella, ironically my favorite character of the cast. I mention in my review that I wait for something to happen which never does, (Spoiler 1) that being that she never admits to and it's never revealed to her husband that she's black. In fact, her husband's main contribution was being white and having money. His presence—if it can even be described as such—is without much conflict, and if there is little conflict or tension between him and Stella, things resolve so easily and by the end of the scene/chapter it makes him uninteresting.
Stella avoids any and every aspect that connects her with her heritage, yet still sleeps with a bat behind her headboard the nights her husband isn't there. Considering she suffered grievously in her youth, first witnessing her father's torture and learning he's been murdered, then being molested multiple times by a white man, I understand why she becomes the person she does. While she causes pain to her sister when she abandons her, I still give her the excuse to make the choices she makes. She wants independence from a life that has only offered her sadness and tragedy. It's when she begins to both turn on black people and at the same time try to earn their favor after acquiring a higher social status that I began to respect her less and find her as annoying as a high schooler. Being a person who can't reveal who she really is to even the closest people in her life, I can see why she questions herself constantly and retreats to safety when confronted by neighbors or her family, however the execution of it, and the repetition scene to scene got old quickly.
It seemed the trait was hereditary as Kennedy begins to capriciously push then pull when Jude comes into her life and reveals a big secret about her. If I were Jude I wouldn't want to be affiliated with let alone be related to these people who clearly want to see themselves as apart. But they're still family regardless right? I don't know. I think if less had been about Reese and more of that time had been on Kennedy and Jude, I would have learned of more interactions between the unbalanced cousins and accepted their rocky relationship more.
How about Desiree and her abusive husband? (Spoiler 2) He was another page of the past I thought would reemerge but never did. He seemed at least a little in part to care for his daughter, goes so much to hire a private detective, but never actually goes to his wife's hometown to see for himself his wife and daughter are there? He just gave up and moves on with a new wife and kids? (By the way she never got an outright divorce so I guess he was married to two women at once??) I just didn't believe it. It seemed as effective as a band-aid on a severed artery.
And I was hours until my loan was to be returned, so I may have sped read the last couple of pages, but did anyone find the ending rather abrupt? (Spoiler 3). Or maybe the significance was spotlighted on the wrong people? We're taken to the day of the funeral where Jude and her boyfriend go swimming. Stella never returns. Kennedy never visits. Desiree relocates to some random city and doesn't even try to pick up fingerprint reading or management. And Early? We don't get a real goodbye? It's like the author was running out of pages allowed by the publisher and she needed to wrap everyone up quickly.
Until Next Time,
Nicole Ciel
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