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I’m tempted to call The Vanishing Half a mystery, a what happened and why sort of mystery, but I think it’s more like a discovery, a gradual unfolding in which character and the surrounding society matter more than plot.

 

The main thread is the tale of twin girls born into a small town in Louisiana; a town so small it isn’t on any maps. The opening line is one that belongs in one of those lists  of memorable opening lines.

 

‘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.’

 

What sort of place is called ‘Mallard’?

 

A place like this: ‘In Mallard, nobody married dark. Nobody left either, but Desiree has already done that. Marrying a dark man and dragging his blueblack child all over town was one step too far’.

 

Wow! You know now that you are in for a deep dive into intolerance, gossip and all the horrors of small-town life. Why continue reading? Well, if you’ve got this far (2% in according to my Kindle) you will already be captivated by the vibrant language and the smart sideways glances of the narrator. You will want to know who Desiree and Stella Vignes are and why they suddenly left town. And what happened to them after they left? And why did Desiree come back? And, hang on, what’s all this obsession with light skin? You will want to know how, what and why, even while the whole concept of Mallard starts to turn your stomach queasy.

 

The story begins in the 1950s. The twins, Desiree and Stella, identical in appearance, differ significantly in personality. In some ways they are two halves of a whole, and in many ways they are not.

 

‘As they grew, they no longer seemed like one body split in two, but two bodies poured into one, each pulling it her own way.’

 

The twins are so pale skinned they can ‘pass’ for white. After they flee Mallard for New Orleans, Stella gets a job as a secretary by ‘passing’ then suddenly leaves to go to Boston, as the wife of her white boss. She has chosen a life where she can never risk anyone recognising her. She has chosen to leave her mother, grandmother and twin sister for ever.

 

So here is the obvious vanishing half of the title. But there is yet more vanishing in this book. It begins in the 1950s but carries on until the 1990s. It is Stella and Desiree’s story but also the story of their daughters: Kennedy, rich, Californian, blonde and desperate for the love of a mother she finds distant and Jude, raised in absurd and abusive Mallard and convinced she is not beautiful because she is too black. Two girls who should share a grandmother but don’t.

 

Vanishing (either of people who should be there but aren’t, of aspects of personality that demand leading a double life, or changing one aspect of life for another) is also the foundation of many of the minor characters in The Vanishing Half. Vanished, or fractured or denied elements of families, and of self, are everywhere. Reese is Trans. He ran away from home, bought street steroids and bound his breasts tight. Early was given to an aunt and uncle ‘because they had no children and his parents had too many’. Barry is a high school chemistry teacher, except when he’s onstage as Bianca twice a month: ‘Barry went to faculty meetings and family reunions and church, Bianca always lingering on the edge of his mind.’

 

I found one of the most satisfying elements of this book the way in which the characters are convincing in their struggle to live the life they’ve been given; complex, neither wholly good nor wholly bad. True there is a whole chorus line of nasty white bigots living in a gated community and another of nasty black bigots living in a town that is an experiment in ‘building a better negro’ but that is what they are, the chorus line, the representation of  American society and its deeply embedded obsession with race.

 

I’ve put ‘passing’, the term for being such a light-skinned black person you would be taken for white, in quotes throughout this little essay. To me the term, and the concept, is so particular to a certain societal mindset it can’t qualify as having a universal English language meaning. That is not the case in any of the American commentary I have read on The Vanishing Half. I wonder whether my British audience will feel the same way. Or even if my American one does.

 

In the Vanishing Half this questioning of a racist society is right there alongside the exploration of individual identity. The consequences of the foundation of Mallard as a community that breeds lighter and lighter skinned negroes spill into the twin’s different decisions, and over again into the lives of their daughters. American society inherits the consequences of its own past decisions.

 

It's a clever book and If you want a clever book that asks serious questions about identity and how you can be honest in a twisted society, and if you like carefully constructed, character driven fiction, The Vanishing Half is for you.