The Vanishing Half - Brit Bennett

Every year, a handful of novels gets hyped by the media and celebrity-readers so much that the books can’t help but stand out from the crowd. Eventually it starts to seem as if everyone is reading the book or planning to read it, and that you can’t go anywhere books are sold without seeing it prominently on display. Brit Bennett’s The Vanishing Half is one of this year’s books that received that treatment. And as so often is the case, this one turns out to be considerably over-hyped, even to the point that it is a disappointment to readers who were led to expect so much more than the novel actually delivers. 

The premise of The Vanishing Half is an intriguing one. Picture a small settlement in 1950s rural Louisiana populated exclusively by a group of black people who have not only segregated themselves from whites but even from darker-skinned blacks. The blacks in little Mallard, Louisiana, look down upon darker-skinned blacks without any sense of irony in the way they do everything possible to exclude those darker than themselves from Mallard. Certainly, no resident of Mallard would ever consider marrying one of them. And the results are obvious to the eye. 

Identical twins, Desiree and Stella Vignes were both so beautiful and so light-skinned that the residents of Mallard couldn’t help but be proud of them. Proud of them, that is, right up until the moment the sixteen-year-olds decide to run away to New Orleans. And then, fourteen years later, when one of the twins suddenly shows up in Mallard – with a little girl, who some swore was so black that she was almost purple, in tow – the townspeople are not at first sure how to react. But react, they do, eventually welcoming Desiree back into the community while treating her daughter as an outcast barely worthy of their attention. 

Now, people wonder when Stella will come home. Stella, however, has been passing for white for over a decade, is married to a wealthy white man who has no idea who she really is, and has a daughter of her own. She has no idea that her sister is in Mallard, and she really doesn’t care. Passing herself off as white has not been as easy as she thought it would be, and the pressure is changing Stella into someone she barely recognizes. 

The first half of The Vanishing Half, during which Desiree and Stella grow up, run away to New Orleans, and then begin to live their separate lives is the kind of page-turner that I expected from the hype surrounding the book. But the second half of the novel, seen mostly through the eyes of Desiree’s daughter Jude and Stella’s daughter Kennedy, is not all that riveting even as the reader begins to anticipate what will happen when the two girls eventually cross paths – as you know they surely will. That the girls happen to stumble upon each other in Los Angeles and then again in New York is just asking too much of the reader. And the result of those encounters is so predictable that I found myself only reluctantly returning to the novel to see what was going to happen next. I have to believe that if Bennett (left) had not changed points-of-view midway through The Vanishing Half that it would have been a stronger novel – one with more to say about the anxieties of the day of trying to pass for white and how that made the abandoned black relatives feel about themselves and the person who had abandoned them. 

Bottom Line: if I were rating The Vanishing Half by awarding the usual stars, I would give the first half of the book five of them, but I would limit the second half to two. Bennett is obviously a talented writer, and a good storyteller, but this one is like reading two separate books, and it left me disappointed that it is not the book it could have been.