Everyone Leaves a Mark

The Vanishing Half, by Brit Bennett

The Vanishing Half  was one of this spring's most anticipated books.  Quite often that makes me decide that I should wait for awhile, but I am so glad I did not wait longer!  This is going to be on my list of favorite books, along with Jesmyn Ward's Sing, Unburied, Sing. Each has an incredibly strong sense of place and each has characters that are immensely human--in their strengths and in their all too human struggles.  I strongly recommend both of these.

The Vanishing Half  is about twins, Stella and Desiree Vignes, who grow up in Mallard, a town that doesn't appear on the map and prides itself for being home to very lighted skinned people.  At  sixteen, Desiree and Stella run away from home, and shortly after, Stella chooses to move again and to live as a white woman, marrying her boss and ultimately living a life of physical luxury in California with her husband and blonde daughter, Kennedy.  

Desiree marries in Washington, DC, and then escapes form her abusive husband and returns to Mallard with her daughter Jude, who astonishes and scandalizes Mallard for her very dark skin.   Desiree, considered the more impetuous twin, lives with her mother and has an atypical but satisfying relationship with Early, who tracks people who are on the run.  After high school, Jude goes to college in California, where she begins a relationship with Reese, a transexual man.  The book traces how time treats decisions mold each of the chracters and how they do a dance of longing for and running from each other, against the backdrop of Stella's choice to "pass" as white.

I do not think I have given anything away in this description.  The beauty of the book is the relationships between the characters and how they navigate the choices they have made.

The important thing is that every chacracter in this book is "passing," except perhaps Desiree, who probably ends up most content with her life, afer initially struggling as an adolescent.  Early's work as a tracker means he is always looking for people who don't want to be found.  He says the key to it is always looking like you are someone else looking for something else.  He breaks his rule of not living when he meets Desiree again.

 

I have read reviews that say that Bennett tries to tackle too much in this book--and why does she have to have Reese be transexual?  I think this is inspired plotting.  Transexuals, more than perhaps any other current group, "pass" as those they physically are not and living with bodies that betray them.  Reese spends years not letting Jude see his chest, which physically marks him as female.  It is only after surgery that she says that he spends most of his time with his shirt off, physically living in his wuthentic body.  Jude struggles in Mallard and with her "white" family as "the dark girl."  Even in her loving relationship with Reese, they are "passing" as a hetero-normative couple.

But the deepest pain in this book is Stella's, who pays terribly for the choices she makes and the damage that she passes on to her daughter Kennedy.  There were many points in this book where I cringed at Stella's bahavior, which is cruel and racist, but Stella is a sad woman who has enough of her own self-loathing and fear.  Any accomplishment or relationship that she has is poisoned by the choices she has made.  

I can't say enough about how much I loved this book.  We each are marked by the choices that we make.