Book Club Recap: The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett

The book we’re ending our book club year with (if we don’t count the Rogue-Book-Club section that will be reading one more book this December) is the most ambitiously executed pick so far. So much to learn from this book! And yes—it is intimidating to see someone’s second book so effortlessly complex.

Let’s dive in!

• STRUCTURE

  For most readers and writers, the three-act structure seems so natural that it’s hard to remember that stories can come in different forms and shapes. Sure, even in this book club we’ve read some books that have had a bit more complex structure (One True Loves; The Sight of You), but despite being divided into four parts, those books didn’t derail much from the usual three-act structure (meaning, those three acts were still pretty much there. You still had your one protagonist—despite multiple POVs, your one main-thread story… oh, the simplicity of it all!).

  This book doesn’t flip three-act structure on its head, it simply ignores it. The story is divided into six sections, each of them with a dominant POV (the author uses omniscient POV, so she often switches between POV characters, more on that soon)—except for the last one, when it’s wrap-up time, and we hear a small account from most POV characters.

  The dominant POV character in each part serves as a mini-protagonist, and there’s a complication that they face that is kind of out of the focus of the main story question (which is: why Stella left, and will Stella and Desiree reunite?) but still closely tied to it.

  In the first section: The Lost Twins, Desiree gets a full mini-story arc, from this restless child wanting to leave her suffocating small town Mallard, to a beaten woman returning home, defeated, only to be reunited with her long-time crush. The thing that ties this to the main storyline is her connection to Stella, the fact that Stella disappeared along the way. This also raises a question in the reader’s mind—what happened to Stella and will they ever reunite, which creates a narrative drive, making the reader want to read on to find out.

  In the second part, Maps, the protagonist becomes Desiree’s daughter, Jude, and her own struggle to fit in—and her falling in love with a transgender man, Reese. The string tying this mini-story to the main storyline is the heritage of the lost twin, the fact that Jude left Mallard behind forever just like Stella did, and ultimately, Jude happening upon Stella in a fancy Beverly Hills mansion.

  In the third part, Heartlines, the mini-protagonist is Stella, and the mini-plot is her friendship with her only black neighbor, Loretta. The thing tying this to the main storyline is the weight of the consequences Stella’s decision had on her life (creating more friction and that juicy narrative drive making you want to know will she just burst and go back to reclaim the deep connection to her twin, or will she stay put in her beautiful, abundant and white, but oh-so-lonely life.

  The following part, The Stage Door, follows Jude again, and the mini-plot is her ‘stalking’ Stella’s daughter, Kennedy. The link to the main storyline is obvious. Will Jude get to meet Stella? How will Stella react? What will Kennedy do if she finds out she’s not as white as she thought, and that her mother lied to her ALL her life?

  In part five, we follow Kennedy and Jude, but with Kennedy as the mini-protagonist, her distrust of her mom, and the consequences her mom’s lack of forthcomingness had on her life. Kennedy is deeply misplaced and unrooted as a result of her mother’s vanished and erased identity.

  Part six, Places, introduces all the POV characters again as they reckon with the aftermath of their severed but still interconnected ties.

  Some members said they would’ve preferred the story focusing on one or the other aspect of this story—Mallard, the town of light black people appealing to some, Reese’s transgender story appealing to others, a deeper dive into Stella and Desiree’s separation story being of interest to some. We concluded that, yes, you could’ve made a separate story out of any of these stories, but THIS is the story the author wanted to tell—the story of all these people and their elastic ties to one another, and she told this story at an expense of delving deeper into any of the smaller stories underneath. This was a legitimate choice to make, and the container the author chose for the story she set out to tell fit it perfectly. We saw nothing wanting in the execution, despite some of us having different personal preferences.

Every story can be told in any number of ways. It’s the author’s job to choose the exact story they want to tell, and then make an informed decision as to what kind of container would serve best for delivering that story.

• OMNISCIENT POV

  Let’s be honest—POV is scary even when you’re writing first person POV. You still run at risk of head hopping, or at the very least, saying the protagonist has a pale face when they can’t see themselves or that the other person was excited, when there’s no way for the protagonist to know how the other person feels.

  Omniscient is scary. Yet, Bennett did a brilliant job. So how did she do it? Like I mentioned, each of the story parts (except for the last one) has a dominant POV—the person who the omniscient narrator seems to be following closely within their respective part of the story. However, there is always a touch of distance there. The narrator gets close to the mini-protagonist, but they’re not 100% inside their head. For those of us who enjoy Deep POV approach (where the reader is so safely tucked inside the protagonist’s head that the protagonist basically becomes their avatar), this story was less emotional than we would have liked.

  The omniscient narrator gets in the third person POV (Desiree’s or Jude’s or Stella’s) but it’s not close POV. The reader still feels like they’re tracking the story from the bird perspective. To this end, the author will use a lot of filter words (she thought, she felt, she examined, she knew), which add to the perceived distance between the protagonist and the reader, because the reader is being told what protagonist is thinking/feeling/knowing instead of just seeing the emotion or hearing that thought.

  Ultimately, this was done strategically. If the author had gotten into the nitty-gritty of close third-person’s POV, we wouldn’t have gotten such a broad overview of the situation, all the way down to how people of Mallard perceived the vanishing of the twins, or coped with Desiree’s return.

  One question raised was if the head-hopping jarred our members. Some said yes, but most weren’t bothered by it. And then one member argued that sometimes non-dominant POV characters served a very specific purpose. For instance, when we hop inside the head of a nameless woman from Mallard who sews dresses for the twins after their father’s brutal murder, it serves as a detail that shows how deep their loss was, without having to show them sobbing their eyes out during the funeral. That leads us to another point:

• USING POSTCARDS vs. SCENES

  In one of his articles, Donald Maass explains his take on the difference between literary fiction and commercial/genre fiction—saying the difference lies in writing in postcards instead of scenes. Scenes move the story forward (changing something outwardly for the protagonist—either by moving them from one place to the other, or by having them coming to a conclusion, realization, decision). All these things happen to the protagonist and change something for him (either his outside world, or his worldview). But postcards move the story forward by moving it deeper. In these excerpts, nothing changes for the protagonist (both their inner and outside world stay exactly the same)—what does change is the reader; they draw the reader deeper into the protagonist’s experience.

  There were loads and loads of postcards in this book—scenes that served no other purpose than to reel you deeper inside the protagonist’s experience of loneliness, abandonment, the price of erasing half their identity. And so, despite the distance created by the bird-view perspective of the omniscient narrator, at moments we felt deeper for these characters than we would if the text was written in scenes delivered with Deep POV. Something to keep in mind!

  Here’s an example of a postcard:

“She kept the picture, though. She carried it with her everywhere she travelled: Istanbul, Rome, Berlin where she lived for three months, sharing a flat with two Swedes. One night they got blitzed, and she showed them the picture. The blond boys smiled at her quizzically, handing it back. It meant nothing to anybody but her, which was one of the reasons why she couldn’t get rid of it. It was the only part of her that was real. She didn’t know what to do with the rest. All the stories she knew were fiction, so she began to create new ones. She was the daughter of a doctor, an actor, a baseball player. She was taking a break from medical school. She had a boyfriend back home named Reese. She was black, she was white, she became a new person as soon as she crossed a border. She was always inventing her life.”

Nothing new happens for Kennedy (inwardly or outwardly) in this postcard, that moves the story forward. It serves only to draw us deeper inside her state of mind.

• PASSAGE OF TIME

  There’s a lot of jumping around in time in this book. The author will revisit more than one memory in a single paragraph, going back and forth in time. It’s all a part of the bird-view perspective—it allows for giving small crumbs of flashbacks and backstory that, ultimately give a well-rounded picture of both events and characters.

  The key to writing seamless time-jumps is to be intentional with the transitions between the jumps. Ease the reader in and usher them out of a time jump. For the most part this was done well, though there were members who said they got confused occasionally about where in the time they were.

  The other key to seamless time-jumps, it seems, is being really specific with the memories. The author never used vague flashbacks, her language was always really concrete, offering very specific memories one can easily imagine in their mind.

  Which leads us to another topic we didn’t touch on during our meeting but I’ll mention it anyway:

• SHOW vs. TELL

  What with the bird-view perspective, the omniscient POV with loads of distance between POV character and the reader, and constant time-jumps, it gets hard not to slip into the telling mode. This is another place where being specific served the author very well. Here’s an example:

In Mallard, Desiree saw Stella everywhere.

Lounging by the water pump in her lilac dress, slipping a finger down her sock to scratch her ankle. Dipping into the woods to play hide-and-seek behind the trees. Stepping out of the butcher’s shop carrying chicken livers in white paper, clutching the package so tightly she might have been hilding something as precious as a s secret. Stella, curly hair pinned into a ponytail, tied with a ribbon (…) A girl still, that was the only way Desiree had ever known her.

• COINCIDENCES

  There were some concerns raised about there being too many coincidences in the book, causing the story to not feel entirely plausible. Some members felt that Jude’s accidental stumbling on Stella in LA, Early Jones, who was Desiree’s first crush being the man who her husband hires to hunt her down, Kennedy getting casted in the same musical with Jude’s friend Barry… was stretching it. The others felt like it could’ve happened, especially given the passage of time between these events. Life can be even weirder than fiction, so most members didn’t have issues buying into these few coincidences happening to facilitate the plot.

• CHARACTERIZATION

  It was generally agreed that the characters were well-rounded and very lifelike. A huge achievement if you take a look at how much air-time each of them got. Yet, they were more real and complex than most protagonists that get the whole book to themselves (in Deep POV or not). There were some reservations about Kennedy being less realistic than others, but ultimately we agreed that due to the superficial way she was raised (her mother showing her only a cardboard version of herself) it was realistic that Kennedy would be superficial, unrooted herself.

  So how did she manage to make all these different people feel so real? Again, specificity. Specificity of issues, experiences, past events that have shaped these people, of ways they related to each other.

  The other thing that made these characters real was avoiding cliches every step of the way. For instance, it would have made sense for the Desiree (the restless one) to pass over, not Stella (the quiet one). But that would’ve been the obvious choice—and when we get to see what motivated Stella, we understood why it HAD to be her. Isn’t that so lifelike, that we don’t see people coming, but when the events transpire, you couldn’t have imagine them acting any other way?

  Another thing that was brilliantly done is the way all these characters had a ‘vanishing’ side to them, an identity they were running away from (Reese leaving Terese behind, for instance) or that they had to reconcile themselves to (Jude accepting herself as the jet-black black). They mirrored and contrasted each other, making this story a really complex exploration of identity and how we choose who we want to be in life—and at what cost.

• NO RED BOWS OR TYING LOOSE ENDS

  The ending was realistic. We discussed whether it made sense that Stella didn’t come clean to Blake. Most of us agreed that after a lifetime of carrying this secret, it made sense that she wouldn’t tell him about her being black or her still having family. Moreover, after a lifetime of making this harrowing decision to leave the people she most loved behind, it makes sense that retying those ends would be more painful to Stella than continuing life without her sister. So it made sense she would stoically endure the consequences of her decision.

  Reese and Jude end up together, but Kennedy is still boyfriend-less, so this seemed realistic too. Her becoming a real-estate agent is indicative of her willingness to move on from her acting career while still employing the same talent and skillset to earn money. It’s also indicative of assuming an identity of make-believe, of lies, something she learned from her mother. In terms of red-bow-tied endings, we agreed that it was realistic that she would forgive her mother for the lies once she came clean, but never entirely forget or be able to bounce back from them. Also, Stella not attending her mother’s funeral, standing by her decision to cut all ties, was realistic too.

• LITERARY vs. UPMARKET vs. COMMERCIAL

  This time there wasn’t even a question; this is undoubtedly a work of literary fiction.

I think it’s safe to say that this is not the book that moved us the most or tugged at our heartstrings, but that we still all stand in awe of its brilliant complexity. Hope you enjoyed this recap. Until next time, keep safe & write on!

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Have you read this book? Did you like it? Let me know your thoughts in the comments!

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