The Vanishing Half
By Brit Bennett
Sometimes she wondered if Miss Vignes was a separate person altogether. Maybe she wasn’t a mask that Stella put on. Maybe Miss Vignes was already a part of her, as if she had been split in half. She could become whichever woman she decided, whichever side of her face she tilted to the light.
Who am I? Who do I want to be? Is it possible to bridge the gap? Likely a few of the oldest questions in the history of human reflection. In The Vanishing Half Brit Bennett seems to sneak up on the reader with these questions. She taps us on the shoulder, whispering tropes in our ear as a story of simple lives teems with complexity in the space between those two questions.
She introduces us to the simplest of characters. A set of twins. One twin returning home after a difficult marriage, and another moving on into a life her sister could only have dreamed of. A daughter and a partner for each twin. And then. Then an unraveling of their stories which repeatedly asks the question: what defines us? And how much control do we have over that?
Through these five characters, Bennett asks us to consider the factors which we use to define ourselves, the factors our cultures use to define us, and the transitory nature of any definition. She invites us to consider how gender identity, race identity, socio-economic identity can all be fluid. She shows us how people outside us create identities for us which have little to do with our internal selves. It was all a bit unsettling to me as I followed each character into their self-awareness, then their created and crafted selves, and finally to the inevitable reveal of their history.
This isn’t a “your roots will always define you” story. It’s more a story about the exchange life offers us between the cards we are dealt when we come into the world, and the way we choose to play them. Does our ancestry define us? Our hometown? Our gender? Our skin color? Our choice of partner? The place we call home?
And what happens when our identity hides us from a truth, or magnifies a truth about who we really are?
It’s a story that raises many more questions than it answers. It reminded me of Rilke’s admonishment to “try to love the questions themselves.”
Bennett invites us into the uncertainties which our seismic cultural shifts are currently presenting to us. She offers the possibility of love and acceptance and compassionate forgiveness as we all stumble along, trying to figure it out. And hopefully into a world where we have more freedom to explore the foundational questions of our existence.