The Vanishing Half
Navigating through this year has been tricky to say the least. Amid social unrest and relentlessly harmful imagery on our tricky phones, I like so many of you are constantly searching for connection and belonging, something not always found in the digital space. That’s where books come in. Always with something to teach us about the world and more importantly about ourselves. As the late literary titan Toni Morrison once said, “Books are a form of political action. Books are knowledge. Books are reflection. Books change your mind.” and no book has completely taken me over and grabbed a hold of my mind this year quite like The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett.
To read Brit Bennett is to slip into the minds of incredibly nuanced, delicate people as she meticulously and gently unspools their secrets, fears, desires and dreams in front of you. Her work is also almost impossible not to devour in one sitting, not just because of her wonderful plotting and twists, but the depth of her scenes and the humanity seeping in every part of her work. The Mothers, her debut novel, affected me in a similar way, albeit in a more familiar one. A powerful story of high school life in a Black community in Southern California, The Mothers details high school friendship and teen dynamics in a way I was familiar with. The Vanishing Half is a much more expansive story, but still just as human and just as powerful.
A story spanning decades, the novel is non-linear, weaving in people and locations in the orbit of the almost mythical Vignes twins, Desiree and Stella. The story starts with a mystery: in 1954 the 16 year-old light-skinned Black sisters run away from their home of Mallard, Louisiana, eventually embarking on two separate but connected journeys. One sister lives her life with her Black daughter, eventually returning to Mallard and the home she once knew, the other secretly passes for white, balancing the life she created for herself while running from her past. It’s by far one of the most powerful novels I’ve read and a bonafide new classic. It’s a story of family, destiny, and how inherited trauma touches not only us but the people we leave behind as well.
Returning to the great Toni Morrison, The Vanishing Half reminded me of Sula in many ways. Both are stories of places, and the people that inhabit them, in that particular order (Bottom in Sula, Mallard in The Vanishing Half). And while Sula and Nel aren’t biological sisters, they’re both women with intertwined fates, constantly pushing and pulling against each other, but never out of each other’s galaxies. Bennett has, of course, spoken of her love of Morrison before, and while the influence is clear, Bennett is truly becoming a literary star in her own right.
The Vanishing Half is one of those novels that leaves you dizzy, drunk off it’s richness as you turn each page, pausing to digest every last word you just read. Bennett doesn’t hold the reader’s hand, instead she simply peels back the curtain as you watch the story unfold in all its glory. While we’re blessed with so many incredibly talented Black contemporary fiction writers right now, and you simply cannot miss The Vanishing Half. It feels like a book that found me, as I truly can’t think of anything more sacred or healing for my Black spirit than reading Bennett’s moving prose. It works on you while you read, and you are affirmed in the beauty of Blackness, the complexity of story and that enduring, magical thing that binds us all together: love.
http://wordmag.com/the-toni-morrison-interview/
https://bookshop.org/books/the-mothers-9781524709860/9780399184529
https://bookshop.org/books/sula/9781400033430
https://twitter.com/britrbennett/status/1158731742813069312
