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<\/a>The title hints at where this novel may take the reader. Brit Bennett\u2019s protagonists are the Vigne twins, Desiree and Stella. Twins are oft sought subjects in many branches of scientific research; for reasons that are as obvious as they are many. And most especially so should they be separated at birth; growing up under disparate socio-economic conditions, a nature versus nurture debate would be the consequence. However, as a fictional narrative device, twins with all their particular character attributes have been surprisingly neglected.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Bennett gifts us such a literary pair. Desiree and Stella, are not separated early in their lives, and so not the best fit for scientific experiment; in fact, they grow up together in small town Louisiana of the 1940s and 50s, intimately bound in one another\u2019s shadow and shared experience, both bearing the trauma of witnessing as children the lynching of their father, wanting only to escape the cruel hand dealt to their mother. And, what a peculiar small town this Mallard is! Populated, and most deliberately so, by \u201ccoloured\u201d folk determined to get less so as generations pass, and the home-town twins a shining example of do-it-yourself social engineering.\u00a0 A different sort of experiment. (I can’t help but wonder whether such a place as Mallard ever really existed, but it could be an imagined “coloured” – and uppity – version of Zora Neale Hurston’s Florida town of Eatonville in Their Eyes Were Watching God<\/em>, which was inhabited and governed by Black people, and based on the real Eatonville<\/a> that was the childhood home of Hurston. To digress: Now that is a novel I love, and must say something about sometime soon!)<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Still together as teenagers, and on not much more than a whim, the girls flee their suffocating nest to the city of New Orleans. And, in search of what? Freedom, perhaps. Perhaps, not explicitly that for which their forbears had yearned for and fought for, but some how akin<\/em>. As alike these light skinned pair physically, so different are they in temperament,\u00a0but circumstances and chance then determine their fate \u2013 and that they will not share, for their ways now part. For the serious, reticent Stella it will mean leaving behind her very self; choosing instead a path paved with deceit, and for Desiree, in youth the so much more adventurous of the two, there will be only some years of adventure \u2013 ending badly, and back in Mallard. But both will bring forth a new generation; daughters who must make their own choices, but each burdened with those made by their mothers.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n And, as fate would also have it, it will be these daughters whose paths will cross; eventually exposing the lies, the loss. Stella\u2019s daughter, Kennedy; brought up white and prosperous and Desiree\u2019s daughter, Jude, as black as the violent father they had left behind (and much too black for the Mallard \u201cproject\u201d to which they returned), are inherent experts on transgression<\/em> and its consequences. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Transition<\/em>: from one race to another, from one society to another, from one gender to another (another strand being that Jude\u2019s boyfriend makes such a move), is powerfully rendered by Bennett within a tight narrative plot; perhaps leaving too much to chance, but then such are those fleeting moments that define one\u2019s destiny. And, perhaps her characters remain not quite tangible: sort of like silhouettes, black and white, one thing or the other, or neither\u2026 But, then, choices are often, at least presented as such, dualities<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Dualism<\/em>, not just in an etymological but in a broad philosophical sense, is something that I thought about a lot when reading this book. Simplified to a body-mind argument, whereby these both are fundamentally separate entities, I understand this story to offer a counter-argument; in which a strict denial of a connectivity between physical properties (say, skin colour) and mental properties (perceptions, emotions) manifests itself in emotional extremes and behavioural anomalies.\u00a0\u00a0Stella may to all intents and purposes be \u201cwhite\u201d, but inside her head she knows the lie that she lives, she remembers the life she lived, the people and places that defined her \u2013 and all those memories are \u201ccoloured\u201d, and coloured by experience. And Kennedy inherits the mother’s lie. Desiree marries so very “black”. A matter of chance or intent – a rebellious act? To then be abused for not being black enough. And Jude will know intrinsically how very much colour matters. Both Stella and Desiree are missing what they once had, the sum of their parts, and their daughters are just missing something, but for a long time know not what.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n This is ultimately a novel about loss \u2013 loss of family, loss of identity; about what it takes to forgive and the limits of true reconciliation; and, how lonely it must feel to be a stranger within your own skin. Nobody is going to live happily ever after in The Vanishing Half<\/em>, but they will muddle on and somehow do the best they can. This is a novel for these times, as such I read it, and as such I am very satisfied indeed. And, that it failed (for me) to fulfil its promise to be one for all times is incidental, for Ms. Bennett is young enough and gifted enough for the best to be yet to come.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" “The Vanishing Half” by Brit Bennett. Be its beginning in a matter of daring or of jest, by mistake or with deliberation, the act of passing, and in respect to racial identity, is not unique to the United States. But, with a relatively young history so defined by slavery and migration, it is the place … Continue reading “The sum of their parts”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[3],"tags":[191,192],"class_list":["post-7951","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","tag-brit-bennett","tag-the-vanishing-half"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stolb01web.ddns.net\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7951","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stolb01web.ddns.net\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stolb01web.ddns.net\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stolb01web.ddns.net\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stolb01web.ddns.net\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7951"}],"version-history":[{"count":31,"href":"https:\/\/stolb01web.ddns.net\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7951\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8030,"href":"https:\/\/stolb01web.ddns.net\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7951\/revisions\/8030"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stolb01web.ddns.net\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7951"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stolb01web.ddns.net\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7951"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stolb01web.ddns.net\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7951"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}