But Bennett excels in conjuring the silences of families and in evoking atmosphere. Bennett’s tendency toward narrative neatness and explication also results in an unhappy tic of tying up sections and sentiments with banalities unworthy of her. Only Stella, gifted in all forms of escape and wonderfully inscrutable to the end, is permitted the mystery and self-contradiction that allows for the fullness of personality on the page. They are given such narrow and precise roles to play.and they play them so responsibly, never deviating from their scripts, that repetitiveness and flatness creep into the writing. The authorial control that so efficiently serves the plot can clip the characters’ wings. Some depth is sacrificed for the swiftness the book doesn’t burrow into the psychology of its characters so much as map the wages of artifice, fracture and loss across generations. Each chapter ends on a light cliffhanger, and the pages fairly turn themselves. The past laps at the present in short flashbacks, never weighing down the quick current of a story that covers almost 20 years. Read Full Review >īennett is a remarkably assured writer who mostly sidesteps the potential for melodrama inherent in a form built upon secrecy and revelation. The vital dynamic between actor and spectator yields different models of selfhood. All of Bennett’s characters wrestle with the roles they have been assigned. But, in Bennett’s novel, Stella, the archetypal passing figure, is hardly the only performer. The narrative of passing inevitably confronts questions of performance: the dissonance between the authentic self and the projected self, the drama of seeing and being seen. The electricity inside this space-past, present, and the stretch between-comes from watching seemingly predictable characters collide in unexpected ways. Her frictionless prose whisks us across a period of nearly forty years, the plot unwinding nonsequentially.
But, as the novel unfolds, we begin to recognize how deftly Bennett is rearranging the generic pieces of her story.
More than once, the plot turns on an outrageous coincidence.
Her omniscient narration roves among story lines, introducing us to a cast of stock characters. she leans into their prescribed melodrama. Bennett roots out these withered tropes and reanimates them in a fresh, surprising story. The Vanishing Half.belongs to a long tradition of literature about racial passing.
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