Stella vanished from the girls’ New Orleans apartment leaving nothing but a note: “Sorry, honey, but I’ve got to go my own way.” In Mallard, Desiree searches for Stella with the help of a rekindled old flame, a bounty hunter named Early Jones. This is a novel that weaves the themes of history, memory and identity. The Vanishing Half is one of my favorite novels of the year; it’s entertaining, fast-moving, has great characters, and Bennett’s writing style is absolutely stellar from start to finish. As Jude suffers the viciousness of her color-struck town, it’s impossible not to think of Pecola Breedlove in “The Bluest Eye.” In Stella — with her indifference to convention that can tip into chilling cruelty — we feel some affinity with the heroine of “Sula.” There is a touch of Dorothy Allison in Bennett’s evocation of girlhood and small-town life, and in the book’s most resonant parallel, Stella leans out of a bedroom window to smoke a cigarette at a party, recalling the climactic scene of Larsen’s “Passing.”. “Or rather, what she wasn’t?”. Brit Bennett’s New Novel Explores the Power and Performance of Race, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/26/books/review-vanishing-half-brit-bennett.html, Brit Bennett, whose new novel is “The Vanishing Half.”. Brit Bennett is the author of the critically acclaimed #1 New York Times bestseller The Vanishing Half, a riveting, expansive, and emotional family story and a brilliant exploration of the American history of passing—provocative, compassionate, and wise. Instead, it switches focus to their daughters and in so doing loses vitality. In a scene late in the novel, Kennedy confronts Stella with evidence of her true identity, but Stella is impassive, as always. We meet Stella on the precipice of crisis: A black family is poised to move into all-white Brentwood. “Saying the word to him was different than saying it to Cindy. Jude’s boyfriend, who is trans and trying to save up for surgery, mourns his own family. Four years later, her second, The Vanishing Half, more than lives up to her early promise. Wasn’t it?” Well, no, but Kennedy doesn’t dwell on this long. If you are looking for a gripping and heartfelt story to read this month, look no further than The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett. The sighting vexes her until she meets Kennedy again a few years later, when, somewhat improbably, she attends a small theater production in which Kennedy happens to have a role. Be the first to write a review. Through all the ways the genre has been rewritten, its potency has remained — its singular ability to enact the notion of race as arbitrary, as a performance, as something seen through, all the while inscribing its power as a source of kinship, pain and pride. “The Vanishing Half” is a book sashed in influences. Their mother, a housekeeper for a white family, is keen to put them to work, but quiet, clever Stella, who dreams of attending college, and dreamy Desiree, enamored with the idea of a life onstage, look at her gnarled hands and flee. [The editors of The Times Book Review chose the 10 best books of 2020.]. With great ambition, Bennett explores these questions through 20 years in the lives of twin sisters, Desiree and Stella Vignes, one of whom chooses to pass while the other does not. Her second novel The Vanishing Half was an instant #1 New York Times bestseller. It’s the story of light-skinned Black identical twin sisters who grow up inseparable in a light-skinned Black community in Louisiana. Curiously, Stella is untraceable, despite Early’s detective skills. Congratulations to Brit Bennett on that #1 NY Times Bestsellers spot You've Got a Friend in Me:On Instagram: https://instagram/Storyscape A Louisiana court upheld the law as recently as 1985. The “one-drop rule” is foundational to all legislation around segregation in America, from the Jim Crow South to the de facto segregation of the North. Toward the end of the novel, sexual role-play with a black lover leads Kennedy to recall the childhood incident in which she, like her mother, called her black Brentwood playmate the N-word. Brit Bennett’s “The Vanishing Half” is a brave foray into a particularly American existential conflict — the tension between personal freedom and responsibility to a community. She is one of the National Book Foundation's 2016 5 Under 35 honorees. £13.15 I think this book works so well because the author has very carefully and thoughtfully No sooner do they land in New Orleans than Stella splits: “Stella became white and Desiree married the darkest man she could find.”. Each chapter ends on a light cliffhanger, and the pages fairly turn themselves. The New York Times wrote, "Bennett balances the literary demands of dynamic characterisation with the historical and social realities of her subject matter." The Vanishing Half has been selected one of the ten best books of 2020 by the New York Times and reached #1 on their best sellers list. by Brit Bennett ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 2, 2020 ... Review Posted Online: March 15, 2020. Published in 2020 by The New York Times-bestselling author of “The Mothers,” “The Vanishing Half” is a stunning novel about twin sisters, inseparable as children, who ultimately choose to live in two very different worlds — one Black and one white. [The editors of The Times Book Review chose the 10 best books of 2020.]. Thus the skill on display, even more impressive. The novel raises thorny questions about the cost of blackness. The Vanishing Half has unforgettable characters, complex familial ties, long-lost sisters, tragedy, and romance. READ REVIEW. Some depth is sacrificed for the swiftness; the book doesn’t burrow into the psychology of its characters so much as map the wages of artifice, fracture and loss across generations. The answers are complicated: Desiree and her daughter emerge intact. Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020. What if the character is never truly found out? Desiree flees her violent husband, falls in love with Early but never marries him because, well, she doesn’t want to. She is a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree and in 2021, she was chosen as one of Time's Next 100 Influential People. Jude is tormented by the absence of her father. Their relationship moves forward in fits and starts, facilitated by plot convolutions that bring them into proximity. What toll might such a decision take on those left behind in blackness? The subject of passing has an impressive literary legacy. bookshelf bookshelf 95; THE VANISHING HALF. It is also about a particularly American existential conflict — the tension between personal freedom and responsibility to a community. The Vanishing Half: from the New York Times bestselling author of The Mothers by. A gig with a catering company takes her to a party in Brentwood, where she serves her cousin Kennedy (unbeknown to either at the time) and catches a fleeting glimpse of Stella. The authorial control that so efficiently serves the plot can clip the characters’ wings. (Emma Trim) Review: ‘The Vanishing Half’ reveals novelist Brit Bennett in full Brit Bennett pulls off her anticipated second novel, “The Vanishing Half,” brilliantly. As old as the story of passing may be, so too is the effort, the history of language and art, to capture its complicated desire and alienating costs. She’s brought her small daughter, Jude, whose “blueblack” skin the town registers with horror. She is a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree and in 2021, she was chosen as one … To pass is to court moral ruin; it is an elective orphanhood (in “Imitation of Life,” passing results in actual matricide), depicted as a kind of amputation or suicide. Stella, after many years as a dutiful housewife, discovers a love of statistics — and feminism — and pursues degrees in mathematics despite her husband’s whiny disapproval. less. Bennett’s tendency toward narrative neatness and explication also results in an unhappy tic of tying up sections and sentiments with banalities unworthy of her — “Sometimes who you were came down to the small things”; “The key to staying lost was to never love anything.”. She is a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree and in 2021, she was chosen as one of Time’s Next 100 Influential People. Item Information. But after growing up together in a small, southern black… These echoes — deliberate and affectionate — are beautiful to behold in a book about suppressed lineages (Pecola Breedlove’s own name invokes Peola from “Imitation of Life”). Certainly few transgressions are punished so severely in literature. The Vignes twin sisters will always be identical. Her debut novel The Mothers was a New York Times bestseller, and her second novel The Vanishing Half was an instant #1 New York Times bestseller. The Washington Post called The Vanishing Half a "fierce examination of contemporary passing and the price so many pay for a new identity". Brit Bennett’s new novel, “The Vanishing Half,” grapples with that American racial chimera known as passing for white. After graduating from high school, Jude arrives in Los Angeles on a track scholarship to U.C.L.A. In 1929, the Harlem Renaissance writer Nella Larsen explored it in her novel “Passing”; her light-skinned female central characters come to no good end, done in by racism and good old-fashioned patriarchy. From its earliest avatars, the 19th-century novel “Clotel,” for example, to Langston Hughes’s short stories and Nella Larsen’s 1929 masterpiece, “Passing,” to the melodrama films of the 1950s, like “Pinky” and “Imitation of Life,” it is a story central to the American imagination, re-examined and retold so regularly it seems to enjoy a perpetual heyday. … Kennedy deserved that, didn’t she? Reviews. Her debut novel The Mothers was a New York Times bestseller, and her second novel The Vanishing Half was an instant #1 New York Times bestseller. Jude is obsessed with her vanished aunt and dazzled by Kennedy, who treats her with breezy disdain. No nation can lay lasting claim to a genre, save perhaps one. Jude will befriend her aunt’s daughter — a flighty, blonde actress — who, like everyone else, is ignorant of Stella’s origins. They are conjured not as real places, one feels, but as their mythologies, in how they exist in the imagination. “She just expected her mother to feel something. The Vignes twin sisters will always be identical. The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett About the Book From the New York Times bestselling author of THE MOTHERS comes a stunning new novel about twin sisters, inseparable as children, who ultimately choose to live in two very different worlds --- one black and one white. When you purchase an independently reviewed book through our site, we earn an affiliate commission. Hot Beer!” its sign proclaims), the jazz clubs in New Orleans where the twins first taste freedom. In Kennedy’s case, the stakes are more straightforward. “Would they see her for what she was?” Stella wonders. But Bennett excels in conjuring the silences of families and in evoking atmosphere: the claustrophobia of the small town and its scuzzy and beloved saloon (“Cold Women! It concerns the half of everyone that disappears once we leave home — love or hate the place, love or hate ourselves.” —Los Angeles Times “Provides a meditation on the nuance of race that feels important, now more than ever. Desiree has a sense of belonging to a place and a people, and a fully developed identity. Now life was steady.”. This New York Times #1 bestselling book is about the lives of two twin sisters, Desiree and Stella Vignes. Sixteen years old and already pressed into domestic service for a white family, the girls run away to New Orleans. It would seem that it isn’t quite possible to stop being black in America, no matter how hard you try. The Vanishing Half Summary From the author of the New York Times bestseller THE MOTHERS, a powerful new novel about the parallel lives of estranged twin sisters who choose to live in two very different worlds – one black and one white. more. Details about The Vanishing Half: from the New York Times bestselling author of The Mothers by. 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. —The New York Times “An eloquent new entry to literature on that most vital of subjects, identity, The Vanishing Half is the novel of the year.”—TIME “A story of absolute, universal timelessness — a story of what it means to simply be, to grow up and define oneself and reinvent, to negotiate a place in the world. The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett review – two faces of the black experience A light-skinned twin sister constructs a new identity as a white woman in a … Write a review. Stella is hard to like: Her choice to cut herself off from blackness is a psychic suicide that leaves her empty, lacking in empathy and bigoted. One moment of honesty.”. Bennett’s novel, written some 90 years later, has a third-wave feminist bent and steers clear of old narratives about biracial women — chief among them that of the “tragic mulatta,” which is just what it sounds like. The Vanishing Half By: Brit Bennett From The New York Times -bestselling author of The Mothers , a stunning new novel about twin sisters, inseparable as children, who ultimately choose to live in two very different worlds, one black and one white. Kennedy’s relationship with her is strained. Within the realm of Jude’s experience, her long lost Aunt Stella is family lore, a shadow. Mar 30, 2021 Regmg1 rated it really liked it. Desiree has come home to Mallard after 14 years away, without her husband but bearing his bruises on her neck. What if she doesn’t die or repent? The girls were raised in Mallard, Louisiana, which was populated by light-skinned black people. Fourteen years later, Desiree returns home just as suddenly as she left, sans Stella but with a dark-skinned child in tow. The twins witness their father’s lynching. It is about racial identity, of course, and three generations of mother-daughter relationships. Desiree and Stella were born in the town of Mallard- a town where everyone is part black and the whiter they are the better. They are given such narrow and precise roles to play — abandoned sister, loyal partner, flighty daughter — and they play them so responsibly, never deviating from their scripts, that repetitiveness and flatness creep into the writing. And with it came the insidious notion that a passing person has acted fraudulently in order to partake in freedoms she should not have. There’s something deeply familiar but weightless about her settings. Despite these shortcomings, “The Vanishing Half” is a brave foray into vast and difficult terrain. Quantity: More than 10 available / 2 sold. Stella’s choices create a void where the past ought to be. When Jude wonders, “How could she leave the people who still longed for her, years later, and never even look back?” we get the sense that the question belongs to Desiree, not Jude, however much the novel labors to force the weight of the past onto her young shoulders. The Vanishing Half speaks ultimately of a universal vanishing. From The New York Times-bestselling author of The Mothers, a stunning new novel about twin sisters, inseparable as children, who ultimately choose to live in two very different worlds, one black and one white.. ASilverwood. Bennett’s work achieves what the best writing strives to do, bring readers into a different existence and make them reflect on the fortunes of others. The story of racial passing is a uniquely and intensely American form. It isn’t a miraculous evolution that’s wanting, but a more thorough examination of Kennedy’s stagnation. A Novel Imagines the Fate of Twin Sisters, One Passing for White, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/29/books/review/the-vanishing-half-brit-bennett.html. Desiree pines for her missing sister. Despite these hardships, Desiree is a woman with agency and a clear sense of the compromises she’s made to ensure her well-being: “She’d made a sort of life for herself here, hadn’t she? Brit Bennett achieved this with The Mothers too (which I also loved and is a MUST-read), but here the cast, the setting and the timeline are even more expansive. Her debut novel The Mothers was a New York Times bestseller, and her second novel The Vanishing Half was an instant #1 New York Times bestseller. 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. In the town of Mallard, La., it’s said that “even a blind man could spot a Vignes girl.” The twins Stella and Desiree — wishbone-thin, unnervingly lonely — are the descendants of the founder of a community established for black residents with light skin. Brit Bennett’s “The Vanishing Half” is a brave foray into a particularly American existential conflict — the tension between personal freedom and responsibility to a community. The Vanishing Half manages this, it feels, with ease. Very compelling (I was hooked straight away) and beautifully-written. Born and raised in Southern California, Brit Bennett graduated from Stanford University and later earned her MFA in fiction at the University of Michigan. ... She is a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree, and her debut novel The Mothers was a New York Times bestseller. In Stella, Bennett balances the literary demands of dynamic characterization with the historical and social realities of her subject matter. Sometimes only one fiction can untangle another. Bennett has written about her debt to Toni Morrison. But it seems Jude’s real concerns are elsewhere — money problems, her medical school applications, her boyfriend and his challenges as a transgender man in the 1970s and ’80s. The novel, Bennett’s first after her much admired debut, “The Mothers,” might well have stayed with these women in whom there is such depth, possibility and dramatic propulsion. Certainly, Stella fares better by every possible socioeconomic measure, but she and Kennedy are shipwrecked, bobbing in open water, even if their life rafts are bejeweled. ), Intermarrying, the residents of Mallard have ensured that each generation is successively paler than the last, never mind how little protection their complexion confers. In due time, we discover that by 1968 Stella — now Stella Sanders — is living as a white woman in Brentwood, Calif., married to a wealthy white man with whom she’s had a daughter named Kennedy. When you purchase an independently reviewed book through our site, we earn an affiliate commission. What then? (Its antecedents can be found in the 19th century’s elite Blue Vein Society, which required members to be light enough for the color of their veins to be visible, as judged by an expert panel. As a result, their sections struggle to find momentum and weight. Start your review of The Vanishing Half. Bennett asks: What is the cost, to an individual and to a community, of the passing person’s estrangement from family, friends, culture and identity — all sacrificed to maintain an assumed whiteness? Others have flipped the formula so that it is black identity that is coveted by characters who are racially ambiguous (in the fiction of Danzy Senna, for example) or plainly white (as in Nell Zink’s novel “Mislaid”). The Vignes twin sisters will always be identical. Free UK Delivery rrp: £14.99. The New York Times Magazine, The Paris Review, and Jezebel. The Vanishing Half – Women's Prize for Fiction Reading Guide; Rate and review Add to reading list. Bennett has written about her debt to Toni Morrison. Hypodescent continues to inform our understanding of who is black and who isn’t, and who has the right to the privileges of whiteness. 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. The Vignes twin sisters will always be identical. It will be Jude who encounters the vanished Stella years later, now living in California and married to a wealthy white man. She is a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree and in 2021, she was chosen as one of Time's Next 100 Influential People. The novel fails to imagine meaningful story lines or compelling links between the young women and their mothers’ burdens. Plot Summary of The Vanishing Half The Vanishing Half byBrit Bennett debuted at #1 onThe New York Timesbestseller list and eventually became theBook of the Year (2020) on Book of the Month Club. In recent years, passing narratives have shed their sentimentality and turned surreal (Boots Riley’s film “Sorry to Bother You”), comic (Spike Lee’s “BlacKkKlansman”) and playful (Mat Johnson’s novel “Loving Day”). Twin sisters, inseparable as children, ultimately choose to live in two very different worlds, one black and one white. To grasp the full measure of Stella’s position, we must consider the concept of hypodescent, colloquially known as the “one-drop rule.” This codification of racial identity stipulated that people possessing any African or African-American blood were black, regardless of appearance or parentage. In her new novel, “The Vanishing Half,” Brit Bennett brings to the form a new set of provocative questions: What if passing goes unpunished? New York Times Bestseller. “The Vanishing Half” is a book sashed in influences. The book opens in 1968, with the return of the prodigal. Only Stella, gifted in all forms of escape and wonderfully inscrutable to the end, is permitted the mystery and self-contradiction that allows for the fullness of personality on the page. Her essays have been featured in The New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, The Paris Review, and Jezebel. News spreads fast, but the truth is more banal, and more heartbreaking, than the townspeople’s gossipy suppositions: The child is Desiree’s daughter, Jude, the product of an abusive marriage to a man in Washington, D.C. Mallard is at once repulsed and intrigued by this little girl, described as “blueblack” — “like she flown direct from Africa.” People in the town live by a strict color code: All are descendants of the mixed-race light-skinned man who founded the place “for men like him, who would never be accepted as white but refused to be treated like Negroes.” In Mallard, “nobody married dark.”. We know these spaces not from life but from literature. 05 Feb 2021. The past laps at the present in short flashbacks, never weighing down the quick current of a story that covers almost 20 years. In 1954, Desiree and Stella disappear from their home in tiny Mallard, La. Recommends it for: anyone. These inspired moments aside, as a character Kennedy is a bit flat, the spoiled rich white girl straight out of central casting, self-pitying and little altered by the events of her life. She is a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree, and her debut novel The Mothers was a New York Times bestseller. When she discovers Kennedy playing with the newly arrived black neighbor’s child, she rushes across the street and snatches her daughter away “because we don’t play with niggers.”, In stark contrast, Desiree is left to contend with a slew of black women’s burdens: She works long hours for little pay at Mallard’s only diner; she cares for her mother, who eventually develops Alzheimer’s disease; she loses Jude to brighter prospects thousands of miles away, as did so many black Southern mothers whose children decamped for the North and West. Condition: Brand New. As Jude suffers the viciousness of her … As Desiree settles back into her childhood home, she is haunted anew by her twin sister’s absence. … No surprises, no sudden anger, no man holding her one moment, then hitting her the next. Her debut novel The Mothers was a New York Times bestseller, and her second novel The Vanishing Half was an instant #1 New York Times bestseller. 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