August 2020
Favorites of the month: The Vanishing Half and The Splendid and the Vile
Brit Bennett’s second novel, The Vanishing Half, tells the story of twins Stella and Desiree Vignes who grow as inseparable “halves” — like “one body split in two” — only to disappear from each other, their destinies severed by race. Their story begins in the sleepy, Southern town of Mallard, “named after ring-necked ducks living in the rice fields and marshes.” Undiscoverable on a map, Mallard feels to the reader like an alternate universe, moored not by a permanent sense of place but by a vision of successively increasing “lightness,” with each generation becoming whiter and whiter — “like a cup of coffee steadily diluted with cream.”
Here, in this universe beguiled by lightness, Stella and Desiree live like princesses, their “skin the color of sand barely wet.” Nevertheless, the twins yearn for the world beyond. Their small-minded town bristles at their dissatisfaction, unable to comprehend how anyone could ever want something more: “You can escape a town,” the townspeople say, “but you cannot escape blood.” Not long after the book begins, Stella and Desiree defy this, disappearing from Mallard and eventually from one another, with “Stella becoming white and Desiree marrying the darkest man she could find.” The twins who seemed inseverable are now completely disembodied, each proving that they can “choose” their race just as readily — and just as subjectively — as their race can “choose” them.
With profound emotion and creative finesse, Bennett paints a picture of the next fifty years, journeying from Mallard to New Orleans, Beverly Hills, and New York City. As it broadens, The Vanishing Half becomes less a tale about race and more a dissertation on the mutability and transience of identity. As she describes the black woman who pretends to be white, the transgender college student who painfully wraps his chest, or the actress who becomes “invisible so that only the character shines through,” Bennett universalizes the theme of identity, but never in ways that feel expected or hackneyed. Each time, the exercise of reidentification provokes a new thought and ushers in a new loss, as if the characters are slipping away, vanishing into a new world where everything — even love itself — is a lie.
The Vanishing Half is one of the most buzzed about books of 2020, and for good reason. At times, it feels like a fantasy, enwrapped in colorful, chimerical inexplicability, and yet at other times it feels like the realest thing imaginable. Perhaps Bennett intended for the latter. In a way, perhaps we are all Stella and Desiree, separating from the world and each other, manufacturing new identities, slipping into an unrecognizable “half” of our former selves; and perhaps the world is Mallard — like a duck swimming blithely along, its outward appearance belying the chaotic truths that clamor underneath.
“How do I feel about 1941?” diarist Olivia Cockett wrote in late 1940, responding to the “December Directive” from Mass-Observation, a nationwide project launched in 1937 to capture humdrum details of everyday British life. “I stopped typing for two minutes to listen to an extra noisy enemy plane,” she answered,
“It dropped a bomb which puffed my curtains in and made the house shiver…and now the guns are galoomphing at its back. There are craters at the bottom of my garden, and a small unexploded bomb. Four windows are broken. Can see the ruins of 18 houses within five minutes’ walk. Have two lots of friends staying with us whose homes have been wrecked. About 1941, I feel that I shall be damned glad if I’m lucky enough to see it all.”
Cockett’s response marks a poignant midpoint to The Splendid and the Vile, Erin Larson’s stunning account of Winston Churchill’s leadership during the Blitzkrieg. Lasting from September 1940 to May 1941, “the Blitz” killed 45,000 civilians in the span of just eight months, leaving survivors traumatized and hopeless, and perhaps “damned glad” that they’d been lucky enough to stay alive.
Though the Blitz began in the fall of 1940, Larson begins his book in the preceding spring, a season trailed by unwelcomed realizations and “bleak expectations.” The Germans, he tells us, had developed bombs that could annihilate entire city blocks; their planes had grown larger and could fly higher than ever before; and warcraft production in the UK was operating according to a lackadaisical schedule. Assistance from the Americans was seeming more and more like a precarious gamble thanks to an increasingly isolationist Congress and an increasingly hand-strapped president.
In this “darkest” of hours, Larson writes, Churchill emerged as a leader singularly suited for his time. Valuing candor, ingenuity, and efficiency, he surrounded himself with undeferential experts who challenged the “tried-and-true” and pushed him out of his comfort zone. More importantly, he was a master in “the art of being fearless.” Through his rhetoric and example, he helped the British people “feel loftier, stronger, and, above all, more courageous,” single-handedly transforming “the despondent misery of disaster into a grimly certain steppingstone to ultimate victory.” “It is rather frightening how terribly they depend on him,” wrote his daughter Mary, observing how indispensable her father was to the preservation of British morale. Reluctantly, the Germans made the same observation, crediting the protraction of their “short war” to Churchill’s resilience: “When will that creature Churchill finally surrender?”asked Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi’s propaganda chief, in the fall of 1940. “This man is a strange mixture of heroism and cunning,” he followed up near the end of the Blitz, adding that “if [Churchill] had come to power in 1933, we would not be where we are today.”
As he does in his other books (i.e., The Devil in the White City, In the Garden of Beasts, etc.), Larson does a phenomenal job in interweaving the emotional with the analytic, crafting a story that completely draws you in, heart, mind, and soul. Leaning into human interest, he infuses his historical account of the Blitz with fascinating details about Churchill, bringing to life his incredible sense of humor and hilarious idiosyncrasies, encompassing everything from his preferred attire (red dressing gown, helmet, and slippers with pom poms) to his devotion to his beloved cat, Nelson.
What I believe makes The Splendid and the Vile so remarkable, however, is not necessarily its “cinematic detail” or emphasis on Churchill’s inner life, but rather its timing — or, perhaps more accurately, its prescience. When Larson sat down to write a book about Churchill’s leadership during the Blitz, he could have never anticipated that a month into the book’s publication, we would be hurled into another global disaster, sharpening our appetite for historical comparison and perspective. There are several ways, indeed, in which Larson’s description of the Blitz mirrors our present struggles with COVID-19, presenting what can seem like an eerily reminiscent stream of dangers, interruptions, and inconveniences. A crucial difference, of course, is that “safety” during the Blitz was not a matter of behavioral self-actualization, as it is with COVID, but rather luck, and “luck alone.” No amount of rule-following, hiding, or mask-wearing could protect the people of Britain from “death from air.”
Another crucial difference, I believe, is that the people had someone like Churchill to lead them. In this portly and peculiar “Bulldog” of a man, the people of the United Kingdom were blessed with a leader who personified not only “the art of being fearless,” but also the art of being present in times of crisis. The Bren light machine gun Churchill kept in the trunk of his car was not a propagandic gimmick, nor was his vow to fight until he was found “choking in his own blood upon the ground” an empty promise. He would be there for the people of Britain until the very end, no matter how terrifying the risk or grave the cost.
I am so grateful to Larson for reminding us what true leadership looks like. Here’s hoping we get some of it in the years to come.