The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett

The Vanishing Half March 11, 2021 Zoom Host: Janna Attended by: Debra, Amy, Michelle, Pam M, JJ

From The New York Times (May 26, 2020) Book Review: In her new novel, “The Vanishing Half,” Brit Bennett brings to the form a new set of provocative questions: What if passing goes unpunished? What if the character is never truly found out? What if she doesn’t die or repent? What then? The book opens in 1968, with the return of the prodigal. Desiree has come home to Mallard after 14 years away, without her husband but bearing his bruises on her neck. She’s brought her small daughter, Jude, whose “blueblack” skin the town registers with horror. It will be Jude who encounters the vanished Stella years later, now living in California and married to a wealthy white man. Jude will befriend her aunt’s daughter — a flighty, blonde actress — who, like everyone else, is ignorant of Stella’s origins. Bennett is a remarkably assured writer who mostly sidesteps the potential for melodrama inherent in a form built upon secrecy and revelation. The past laps at the present in short flashbacks, never weighing down the quick current of a story that covers almost 20 years. Each chapter ends on a light cliffhanger, and the pages fairly turn themselves. 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. Desiree pines for her missing sister. Jude is tormented by the absence of her father. Jude’s boyfriend, who is trans and trying to save up for surgery, mourns his own family. 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! Hot Beer!” its sign proclaims), the jazz clubs in New Orleans where the twins first taste freedom. There’s something deeply familiar but weightless about her settings. They are conjured not as real places, one feels, but as their mythologies, in how they exist in the imagination. We know these spaces not from life but from literature. **************************************************** Next Month: The NightWatchman by Louise Erdrich