The author of the Women’s prize-shortlisted The Vanishing Half talks about race, the dangers of nostalgia and writing only what pleases her There was a rule to which Brit Bennett adhered during the writing of her novel _The Vanishing Half_. It is a sprawling blockbuster that opens in a small town in Louisiana in 1954 and unspools almost to the present day. It takes twin girls, Desiree and Stella, and through their divergent fortunes tells a story of race and class in America, in which history appears much closer than one might think. Bennett’s rule of composition was this: in a narrative heaving with sadness and disappointment, whenever the writing started to drag like homework, she broke off, only to pick up again when she’d rediscovered the joy. “Just write the parts that are exciting to you,” she thought, “and figure out later how you’re going to connect it.” The smart premise of _The Vanishing Half_ helped to propel it to the top of the bestseller lists in the US, where it appeared as one of the New York Times’s best books of 2020 and was longlisted for the National book award. Desiree and Stella, twin girls born and raised in the fictional town of Mallard, make a startling decision after running away in their teens. Mallard, which “had always been more of an idea than a place,” writes Bennett, is peopled exclusively with light-skinned African Americans, “fair and blonde and redheaded, the darkest ones no swarthier than a Greek”. After arriving in New Orleans, one twin decides to “pass” as white; the other remains black. Through this device, Bennett is able to explore not only “shadeism” and the arbitrary demarcations between racial groups, but other social boundaries, too. “A lot of stories about passing are about these multiple forms of passing,” she says. When Stella marries a wealthy white man, she is confronted with the task of not only performing whiteness (“there was nothing to being white except boldness,” writes Bennett), but performing wealthiness, too. Continue reading...
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