From Shakespeare's Twelfth Night to Cathleen Schine's The Grammarians, duos have served as a useful device for exploring issues of nature versus nurture, mistaken identity, double trouble, and the divided self. In The Vanishing Half, Bennett also draws on another, even more widespread literary tradition: Twins. But unlike here, they usually involve retribution for what is regarded as an unforgivable moral transgression. Novels about racial passing - including Nella Larsen's Passing (1929) and Philip Roth's The Human Stain - have been a recurrent feature in American literature. Stella became white and Desiree married the darkest man she could find.'Īuthor Interviews Pregnancy Is Personal, Not Political, In 'The Mothers' We learn in the first few pages that at 16, Desiree and Stella ran off to New Orleans, two hours away, but 'after a year, the twins scattered, their lives splitting as evenly as their shared egg. Nor did it save their mother from an impoverished existence cleaning for rich white people in a neighboring town, and it won't save the twins from an equally constricted life if they stay in Mallard. Yet fair skin did not save their father, whose vicious lynching by a gang of white men marks the girls irrevocably. Over time, its prejudices deepened as its population became lighter and lighter, 'like a cup of coffee steadily diluted with cream.' The twins, with their 'creamy skin, hazel eyes, wavy hair,' would have delighted the town's founder. 'In Mallard, nobody married dark,' Bennett writes starkly. Spanning nearly half a century, from the 1940s to the 1990s, the novel focuses on twin sisters, Desiree and Stella Vignes, who were raised in Mallard, Louisiana, a (fictional) small town conceived of by their great-great-great grandfather - after being freed by the father who once owned him - as an exclusive place for light-skinned blacks like him.

It's also a great read that will transport you out of your current circumstances, whatever they are.

It's an even better book, more expansive yet also deeper, a multi-generational family saga that tackles prickly issues of racial identity and bigotry and conveys the corrosive effects of secrets and dissembling. Four years later, her second, The Vanishing Half, more than lives up to her early promise. How?īrit Bennett's first novel, The Mothers, was the sort of smashingly successful debut that can make but also possibly break a young writer by raising expectations and pressure. Your purchase helps support NPR programming. Close overlay Buy Featured Book Title The Vanishing Half Author Brit Bennett

Butterball by Brit Bennett