A Sharp Right Turn like a Reckless Uber Driver
a review of The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett
Like many other people on the internet, I read The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett. It’s a book that seems to be everywhere these days, like industrial-grade hand sanitizer. Unlike industrial-grade hand sanitizer, it’s crafted with care and does not make your hands smell like a vodka soda. Bennett has created a story that dances between sur- and hyper-real worlds where coincidence is natural.
The story is about a pair of twins, which exist via coincidence. I am not a twin, but I did have three sets of twins in my kindergarten class of 15 people (weird). Bennett has spun personal histories that speak to racism, redlining, colorism, the queasy feeling you get when your relationship with a family member spoils over time and then all at once like forgotten milk. These stories intersect like a hand-me-down patchwork quilt, more than the sum of its parts.
After growing up in a fictional town of light-skinned Black people, Stella and Desiree move to New Orleans and Stella becomes white--more specifically, the human embodiment of Lilly Pullitzer matching separates. Stella performs and eventually becomes a white woman who seems to have 911 perpetually keyed in to her phone, unafraid to weaponize whiteness and a failed experiment in basic human decency. She blows a gasket (?) at a neighborhood association meeting when a Black family tries to buy a home in her L.A. neighborhood, partially because she fears they will recognize her and her Blackness that she has spent years shedding.
This print…. so garish… flatters few and far between…
Stella’s daughter is named Kennedy *collective wince*, and never grows out of the childhood stage where a kid says “wanna watch me perform my show?” and proceeds to dance like microwave popcorn and sing atonal Jojo Siwa. No one ever tells Kennedy “girlie your show sucks” so she grows up and becomes an actor and bungles through life violently ignorant. Stella’s daughter is split-screened with Desiree’s daughter, Jude (cool name), who grows up the only dark-skinned girl in Mallard, treated unfairly at every turn with no means to escape until college. She makes it, though, and while challenges don’t recede she masterfully builds a meaningful life for herself and those around her.
This book is like… really good. It bubbles over with thoughtful detail. When you think it’s headed in one direction it takes a sharp right turn like a reckless uber driver. Read it before or after another extraordinary book, The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson. Ultimately, you don’t have to spend 45 minutes looking at people to be jealous of on instagram when these perfect books exist!