The Vanishing Half
Why I read this book
This was a popular book club book for 2020 and had landed on my to-read list because it promised an interesting take on race. My mother read it for her book club and lent me the copy, so I read it.
One key takeaway
The Vanishing Half is a story of twins, two halves of the same, one passing for white and the other black, and the effect this has on their self-worth and family. It is a story about what an authentic identity is, and how the selves we craft affect the lives of those around us.
How was the book
I had gone into this book with moderately high expectations, thinking it a “post-racial” meditation on race, where the selves we wear can be constructed from within rather than imposed from without. There is a long history of “passing” literature, often with bi-racial black women passing for white, stealing the hearts of some aristocratic white man. This has always been framed as a class issue, however, with the black woman rising from poverty to the top of the mountain, only to be discovered on the precipice of marriage. This anxiety permeates Stella’s interactions with her husband, the Apollonically handsome Blake and her daughter, Kennedy, who seems to bear the cross of her mother’s denial of identity with her own listlessness. She aspires to be an actress, like mother like daughter.
The novel meandered far too often, leaning too heavily on its premise than its actual character development. We are told the story in third-person, and from such we only are allowed fly-byes to the character’s emotional states. There is a trans character, but other than saying ‘baby’ too often and struggling with hiding his physical existence, the character is given no room to breath, to live and grow. It frankly feels token, as if its another box top check on the intersectionality list. None of the characters do much of anything at all; all dramatic development is driven by random encounters. Kennedy and Jude meeting at a play, Jude and Stella and Kennedy meeting at an event Jude was catering, Early being given an assignment to track down his adolescent crush. It all makes you question the agency any of these characters have, despite the apparent ability to craft their own identity, an ability that is expressly denied those who can’t pass.
Beyond that, the dialogue can’t make up its mind between real speech and literary speech, the book jumps forward and backward in time for no particular reason, and nothing in particular happens but time moves on. I just did not enjoy this book at all.
Any other reading
- Passing For White, a Literary History
- Passing, by Nella Larsen, 1929.