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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