IN HER STUNNING second novel, Brit Bennett, author of The Mothers, once again examines race and kinship. This time, she interrogates the color line through the Vignes twins—their coming of age and its impact on the subsequent generation. Born and raised in the fictional town of Mallard, La., the twins dream of escaping their stifling community. At 16, they run away together. In New Orleans, a desperate choice severs their bond: Stella passes as white to get a job, then leaves her sister Desiree in order to marry a white man.
Years later, when Desiree flees an abusive marriage and returns to Mallard with her daughter, Jude, the town is shocked by the child’s color: “black as tar,” “blueblack.” Having inherited her father’s complexion, Jude looks nothing like her mother. From its opening pages, The Vanishing Half grounds us in this “strange” town that, “like any other, was more idea than place.” The idea: a community for those “who would never be accepted as white but refused to be treated like Negroes.” An idea born of a freed slave, the twins’ ancestor, as he “stood in the sugarcane fields he’d inherited from the father who’d once owned him.”
While fictional, Mallard is still situated in America. This means the community’s proximity to whiteness is no protection: As children, Desiree and Stella are forced to witness their father’s lynching. Decades later, Stella cannot sleep without a baseball bat at her side. No matter how far Stella disappears into the privileges of whiteness, the realities of race deepen her silence, crippling new bonds and poisoning relationships.
The novel covers two decades, from 1968 to 1986. Jude grows up alienated in Mallard until she flees to college at UCLA. In Los Angeles Jude finds a new home with her boyfriend Reese, who is trans, and their friend Barry, professor by day and drag queen Bianca by night. Meanwhile, her aunt Stella remains a specter in Jude’s narrative. In an impeccably wrought sequence of events, Jude befriends Stella’s daughter, an aspiring actress. Soon, Jude finds her way back to Stella.
As much a compassionate tale of belonging as it is a critical exploration of race, Vanishing depicts a world that is achingly real, where no two subjects are mutually exclusive. It shines in the moments of human connection (the strained, the failed, and the successful), when Bennett juxtaposes characters’ desires to reveal dreams and delusions, internal narratives that are simultaneously contradictory and true. Propulsive, urgent, and endlessly engaging, this second novel cements Bennett’s place among the best writers working today.
Elinam Agbo earned an M.F.A. from the University of Michigan's Helen Zell Writers' Program. Born in Ghana, she grew up in the U.S. Midwest.
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