BBBC Discussion May 5: Notes
RV liked this book a lot, although with some caveats. The positives included the quality of the writing, from the great first sentence: “The morning one of the lost twins returned to Mallard, Lou LeBon ran to the diner to break the news, and even now, many years later, everyone remembers the shock of sweaty Lou pushing through the glass doors, chest heaving, neckline darkened with his own effort”. The use of excellent images and phrases: “One morning, the twins crowded in front of their bathroom mirror, four identical girls fussing with their hair”; “The idea arrived to Alphonse Decuir in 1848, as he stood in the sugarcane fields he’d inherited from the father who’d once owned him.”; “Her death hit in waves. Not a flood, but water lapping steadily at her ankles. You could drown in two inches of water. Maybe grief was the same.”
RV liked the plot movements, and the three generations, and the underlying discussions throughout about race and gender, and highlighted some of interesting ideas raised such as: On becoming who you wanted to be: “She felt queasy at how simple it was. All there was to being white was acting like you were.”; and then later: “That was the thrill of youth, the idea that you could be anyone.” Or the issue of twin-ness: “but she liked being part of an us. People thought that being one of a kind made you special. No, it just made you lonely. What was special was belonging with someone else.” ; or on alienation: “There were many ways to be alienated from someone, few to actually belong.”
However, there were some things he felt which jarred, such as that the ‘trans’ and the ‘cross-dressing’ elements were unnecessary and took away from the main important lines. He thought that some of Stella’s actions were entirely out of character – for example: ““I had a twin sister. You remind me of her a little.” She hadn’t planned to say this, and as soon as she did, she regretted it”. Stella has spent decades being unbelievably careful and hiding every element about her past. It is SO unlikely that she would reveal so much, and especially to a black woman! But overall, he found the book very enjoyable, and one that will stay with him.
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CW enjoyed this book which he felt dealt with a number of very topical issues but at the same time couldn’t help being reminded of his comments from the last book (1000 Moons) which he felt was rather contrived in its storyline in order to carry several of its main themes. There were a number of issues that he couldn’t quite get his head around, including: the community of black people who actually looked white( Mallard); Stella’s dogged desire to remain out of touch with her mother and sister because she wishes to continue living the lie of being white; also the inevitability that Jude has to end up meeting and living with a trans-person and getting to know the LGBTQ community in LA; and also. They all felt rather contrived, but necessary I suppose to create the interesting storyline of the book.
To him the whole LGBTQ experience in LA was rather unnecessary as it diverted from the principal theme of race and colour in the US and how this is perceived an experienced from both white and black people and people of mixed race. Once Barry turned up on the scene who at weekends became Bianca having just got used to Reese's sexuality it was all beginning to get too much!?
But having got over these moans CW felt that this was an interesting book. The characters were real and well described and their emotions feelings and ideas realistically expressed in good dialogue. He thought it was good telling the story through three generations showing how attitudes to race colour and "difference" had changed and continue to change. Overall, a good book but could've been shorter.
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AA saw this as a story about race and inequality and identity and lies and living a lie. It had a great start with great descriptions: “She regretted the words as soon as they left her mouth, but by then, it was too late. She had rung the bell, and all her life, the note would hang in the air”. “I love shopping,” she’d said, almost to herself. “It’s like trying on all the other people you could be.”
The book had some terrible stories of racism and violence with white men torturing and lynching the twins’ father Leon for little or no reason. The way that black people in the US were treated as if they were not people - like the Indians in A Thousand Moons. The book brought out the terrible loneliness of Jude as a child being taunted and hurt continually and totally ostracised and alone.
He liked the clever plot contrasting twins with the links of the daughters and their mother, and the LA cast of characters - drag queens etc, and Jude's chance encounter with Stella at the retirement party. The way things came to a head with Loretta and her family, Jude's chance glimpse of Stella and the pursuit of Kennedy, and then her rather confrontational meeting with Stella which goes badly and provides no resolution. He thought the way Stella's deception and lies played out in the next generation was clever and although it was protracted and made you wish they'd just have a decent chat and try and improve things, it showed up how damaged Stella was from her trauma (and her sister too who was stuck in the safety of the job at the diner which she hated). He really enjoyed the meeting between Stella and Desiree in the diner reflected in what the dozy drunk saw and what he didn't.
AA found it uncomfortable reading at times and no tidy ending with neat resolutions. He felt it was quite a suffocating read all round – each of the characters lived with suffocation and constraints in one way or another. The awful trauma when the sisters witnessed of the father’s death. Everyone seemed to carry a lot of pain: “He was raised in the projects of Cleveland and he loved that city with the fierceness of someone who hadn’t been given much to love”. “Her grandmother would not be sitting on the porch to greet them. Her death hit in waves. Not a flood, but water lapping steadily at her ankles. You could drown in two inches of water. Maybe grief was the same.”
At end of the story Bennett discusses the pallor of the skin on Reese’s chest compared to the rest of him, just after the people of Mallard had been wondering how Jude had become a medical student when she was so black. The book ends with them floating in the river instead of attending the wake of her grandmother, begging to forget – for Reese his family and life as a girl, and for Jude her terrible ostracised childhood.
AA thought it was a clever book, exploring powerful issues in a relevant authentic way but it didn't completely pull me in and make me care enough about the characters – even Early, Desiree, Jude and Reese. He was really pleased to have read it even if it was not a comfortable read.
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SC soon got into the swing of the book,
despite what felt like a misstep in the first few lines: '…sweaty
Lou pushing through the glass doors, chest heaving, neckline darkened with
his own effort. The barely awake customers clamored around him…'
He wasn’t sure barely awake customers would clamour. But
anyway…
SC felt that Bennett builds the back story fluently. Desiree and
Stella’s stories were deftly handled, with little mortar bombs of
surprising and sometimes horrifying detail about the casual racism and
violence that characterised American life, particularly in the rural
southern states in the 50’s, 60’s and 70’s. The murder of their
father, particularly so.
On page 22: ’By the time Desiree found the nerve to leave, she
hadn’t spoken to Stella since she’d passed over. She had no way to reach
her and didn’t even know where she lived now’. Brought to mind the
film from last year called ‘Passing’, which dealt with the same subject.
The prose had an easy-going feel to it that sometimes verged on the
Chandleresque: very American, very much of the time and people and
geography she was writing about: ‘The man beside him said
something that made him smile into his whiskey. Those high cheekbones
pierced her. Even after all those years, she would know Early Jones
anywhere.’
The ‘twins separated – will they find each other – theme is well-used:
SC thought of ‘The Prince and the Pauper’ and he was sure others could
think of more. In that respect it felt a bit unoriginal, and while this
was certainly a different variation, Bennett seemed to spend quite a lot
of time moving the pieces around to get her characters into the
situations she wanted.
Admittedly this allowed Bennett to develop situations that enabled the
layers hiding Stella to be peeled back, and the creation of a different,
interesting and strong character in Jude was effective. Reese was arguably
a bit of a distraction, but SC felt that by giving Jude an asexual partner
(at least initially) she could concentrate on the search of identity,
rather than a search for love.
But he felt that the plot lost momentum in the comfortable lifestyle Stella
was leading with her banker husband. He missed the really powerful
direct descriptions and situations from earlier in the book when she was
still setting up the back story. Could Bennett be accused of selling out
her Black heritage by creating such a shocking but potentially
plausible set of circumstances in the first half of the book, embedded in
the casual racism we know to be true of the time, only to use that as a platform
for a series of ‘will they/won’t they’ plot lines that felt as though they
were deliberately designed to help sell the TV/film rights? Or does
that play into a scenario where Black people aren’t allowed to be
comfortable and aspirational? Discuss…
SC felt that the author manipulated the characters and their situations
rather too readily to be believable. The risk Stella took in having a
child with a white man was huge. The whole book could have centred around
the issues buried in there. The ending was OK, but all a bit mawkish.
Mother’s Alzheimer’s, and the funeral, and the way it brought Reese and
Jude back together, and all the rather glib convenient loose end tying
amounted to a rather unmemorable, slightly disappointing end to a
potentially interesting book.
CB felt this was an engaging and easy to read book which kept his interested throughout. He liked the three-generation quality of the book, with the third generation turning out so very different in their approach to life as well as colour. There was symmetry too in the more adventurous twin ending up back in her hometown whilst the shy one created a totally different life for herself. He felt we heard real voices form each of the main characters and a consistency of conversational style in each one. CB also felt he got to know all the key players and the quality of their interactions with each other. Some beautiful writing about small events e.g. A long afternoon of celebration while the band played, the night ending in a dance in the school gymnasium, where the grown folks stumbled home after too many cups of Trinity Thierry’s rum punch, the few hours back in that gym pulling them tenderly toward their younger selves. And powerful writing about shocking events such as the lynching of Leon.
Characters: Whilst CB liked the characters and found them interesting, he did not feel strongly excited by them. There was a good sense of the tension, Stella felt in living her lie making her child feel shut out (but was it a lie really?) and the relationship between Jude and Reese, her trans boyfriend was also intriguing and well described.
Relationships: Good
mother daughter relationships, complete with intergenerational tensions. “That was the problem: you could never
love two people the exact same way. Her blessing had been doomed from the
beginning, her girls as impossible to please as jealous gods.”. He noted that the men were more side
characters though well drawn.
Dilemmas: What are your options when you
escape your family and small-town living? It’s tough at first but you live on
your wits and your optimism and your family and friends’ support. What colour
do you choose to be as a mixed-race person? Black and put up with the systemic
racism you will face or white and live in fear of being outed as black? As a white,
you have access to more wealth and respect: but how do you treat others who are
black? Where do you belong? Things are changing, maybe as the third generation
is much less exercised by race and gender stereotypes. The white girl can face
her own demons and the black girl can live in confidence.
Underlying Theme: It is still tough to be black in the USA (and other places), but the life of a white person may lack genuineness and joy. Family and intergenerational relationships are tricky to navigate but we are still drawn to our close relatives.
Negatives: CB felt it was a satisfying book but no great insights or excitement for me. Some of the encounters seemed rather unlikely as BB says herself: Statistically speaking, the likelihood of encountering a niece you’d never met at a Beverly Hills retirement party was improbable but not impossible.
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MW found the Vanishing Half an engaging story and an enjoyable read. He thought it was a brilliant premise for a story. It well-captured some of the challenges faced by communities in the US over the two generations in an imaginative way – particularly the description of the fears in prosperous middle-class white communities. He found some of the characters really interesting notably the twins themselves, as well as the relationships between some of the characters such as between Early and Desiree or the way that the relationship between Stella and Loretta developed and ended. But he was less convinced by the characters of the two granddaughters – Kennedy and Jude. MW felt the key chapter was the one in which Stella comes home to Mallard in that it brought together so many of the issues raised in the story. MW also highlighted the way that some of the narrative and descriptions were rather understated, such as about Adele’s dementia, and worked the better for it.
Though the story was well-set up MW had a slight feeling of disappointment towards the end. He thought the issue of Reese and his sexuality was a bit of “filler”. The description of the reunion was underwhelming – though MW acknowledged that he was not sure what else the author could do support the story line.
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JH was pleased to have read this novel, which he felt lived up to its plaudits – the fluent and readable style, a good piece of contemporary storytelling with some timely insights into the poison of racism. The story follows the journeys of two estranged twin sisters leading very different lives. They adopt different identities that reflect the lives they have chosen, their different communities, families and racial identities. Yet while they are separated by these choices - distance, time and a background of lies and deceit, the fates of these twins remain intertwined – particularly through the lives of their own children.
The book tells their story in an engaging and surprisingly plausible way considering the complexity of their stories, and the different life journeys they have been on. But JH felt that it was more than just a successful narrative as it dealt with some wider themes. Such as to the way our parents shape or lives and how we inherit so much from them and yet know so little about the lives they lived when they were younger. JH also felt it raised important issues as to what it means to be authentic and to the degree we can decide and/or create our own identities. The story highlights lasting influence of the past in the way that it shapes anyone’s decisions, desires, and expectations. It also explores the range of reasons why some of us sometimes feel pulled to live a life as something other than what our initial origins might have foretold. It raised questions as to how much of our personal narrative about our life is a genuine or honest account of what or who we are?
JH also reflected that this book was yet another effective and insightful commentary on the difficult and fraught state of race relations in the US. He saw this book as part of the wider literature that captures the racial tensions in the US, but also another insight into the way the US has developed over the last 150 years as we have explored in some of recent books we have read. For example, the tensions in the post-civil war South (Sebastian Barry’s Thousand Moons), or the background to, and tensions in, 1970s youth culture in middle America (Jonathan Franzen’s Crossroads). JH saw this historical narrative continued in the way that this novel successfully weaves together the multiple strands and generations of a particular family, from the Deep South to California, from the 1950s to the 1990s. He felt the Vanishing Half was a powerful and well-written exploration of recent American history and attitudes – albeit explored through particularly creative and quirky lens.
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MT found the Vanishing Half an enjoyable read. He thought it was well-written, easy to read
and some good quotes. There were some
strong images and good descriptions. He liked the characters which were really
interesting and the way that the author portrayed emotions; also the mix of
issues covered – gender, race, sexual identity etc. MT thought the book dealt
with these really relevant “big” themes in an accessible, easy-to-read
way. In particular, the issue of
authenticity and what it means to be authentic in a world where it is
increasingly possible to re-invent or even self-create yourself – including
your gender or racial identity. He highlighted the challenges that Stella faced
once she identified herself as white and married a white man and lived in a
white neighbourhood.
However, MT also found some of the book a bit far-fetched, such as the meeting of the meeting up at the party. He was not convinced by the character of Reese, and he felt some of the issues around trans-sexuality and cross-dressing were rather contrived in the context of the story and which he felt he worked to the detriment of the “big” themes in the story. He was also uncertain as to the way that Stella tried to reveal identity to her black neighbour, Loretta Walker, after so many years of trying to hide her racial background or where she came from.
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WM did not really get into this book – got
halfway and then got bored so gave up.
He thought the book covered some great themes, but he didn’t really
appreciate the writing – what he felt was too much rather simple, even crude,
narrative. WM recognised that the novel
dealt with some important issues. In particular the issue of identity, self-identity
and the struggle about who you are and who you were. He sees this as something that can be a huge
internal struggle for some people and an obstacle that has to be overcome. In this context and the background the twins
have come from he can understand the dilemmas they face or how they or their
children react – including the way that Stella can identify with her new black
neighbour Lorretta Walker or how Jude
could not believe that she would ever be loved.
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