I AM CATCHING up here--when school started, I fell woefully behind in my blogging. Fiona Hill (see post of a minute past) was our book club selection of August, and this novel that of September. I read Richard Thompson back in July. I have about five more to catch up on. But I will.
Anyway.
The main plot of The Vanished Half is about light-complexioned identical twin sisters, one of whom decides to pass and cuts ties with her family. Much later sisters' daughters, cousins who have never met, do meet; one of them figures out what is going on, leading to one final meeting of the original twins. A little soap-opera-ish, but plausible enough if the reader decides to just roll with it.
Bennett's novel reminded me much of Toni Morrison, thematically. Relationships between women, within and across generations, get more attention than relationships between women and men. We get to watch the dynamics of almost entirely Black communities; we get a sense of what differences darker or lighter shades of skin color can make.
What the novel does not have, though, is that special Morrison density. Morrison would give you a paragraph from this or that character's perspective and the paragraph would be veined with that character's history, memory, regrets, and hopes, saturated with that character's discourse. Bennett just isn't there yet, maybe.
Chapter 8 was the best episode, I thought. The twin who is passing (Stella) hazards all by striking up a friendship with the wife of the Black family that is integrating Stella's (supposedly) all-white neighborhood. Bennett gives us a convincing account of Stella's trying to manage her yearning to re-connect to her culture and her attraction to the new neighbor while also trying to stay friends with the neighborhood wives who want to freeze out the interloper.
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