Temptation & belonging in 2 great new novels
A family. A team. A fraternity. A political party. A culture. A generation. A race. Belonging is so important to us, we can’t help but find ways to create it, and to nurture that feeling for ourselves, over and over again. But, as every victimized outsider or former bully knows, our desperation for belonging can also take us down dangerous paths, tempt us to trespass against other values and truths and needs.
In these two new novels, Catherine House (Elisabeth Thomas, her first) and The Vanishing Half (Brit Bennett, her second), characters who exist at the margins of other groups find themselves tempted by somewhat unholy opportunities to belong. Like Ariel in The Little Mermaid, who will give up her voice in order to join the world outside the water, the women in these books juggle with their very souls.
The similarities between these books mostly ends there, though each has a sort of mystery buried in its heart.
Catherine House is a savory, slow-cooking dream of a novel, a melange of sensuous snippets that build an atmosphere around you so steamy—or is it a dense, malevolent fog?—that you won’t want to leave. That describes the “house” itself, too: a secretive, elite, tuition-free college whose alumni seem to be found in every seat of power. Is it just great networking? A top-notch education? Or does it have something to do with the mysterious, cutting-edge research on “plasm” that goes on behind its iron gates?
When our narrator, Ines, arrives as a new student, she’s heard the rumors, but knows little about what to expect. Catherine House cloisters its students for three years: nobody leaves campus, and nothing of the outside world comes in. (It seems inevitable that the book is set in the …nineties?… before the digital revolution would make such a premise incredibly hard to pull off.) She’s running from the memory of some frightening close calls and is more than happy to ditch the outside world. She’s suspicious of her classmates who show up already having bought in to the mythology and traditions of the school, but Ines’s defenses are eventually worn down. She lets the school begin to mold her, and she flourishes, even as Catherine’s dark side begins to reveal itself.
I was impressed by Thomas’ ability to paint the school so vividly through its weather, food, and burlesque-teasing glimpses into dorm bedrooms. On a familiar, beguiling scaffolding of cavernous dining halls with oak tables, and student lounges with creaking antique furniture, she adds woven tapestries and stained glass windows and Escher-like stairwells. The campus environs are palpable: ”…Fig trees’ leaves shrouded our bedroom windows. The grass on eat yard turned electric-green and grew anxious with the noise of bees and mosquitoes.” Students are constantly eating—but as if they lived in a Dutch still life, not a dormitory— a multi course meal is described thus: “Meat cakes, fatty lamb chops, savory rice pudding by the bowl, and for dessert, ladyfingers, and snowy piles of vanilla cream, and plums, apricots, frosty black grapes.” The endless flow of ripe, juicy fruit and rich dairy underlines the intense, alive, and fleeting present the students occupy. It’s a great metaphor for the brief splendor that college can be, and for youth itself.
Most colleges—elite ones, anyway—do engage in their own myth-making. They speak of hallowed pasts and unbearably bright futures. Every current student is lauded as a fulcrum between the two. And yet, how much have we heard about the awful doings that such insular, powerful institutions let happen within their scrollwork gates, or even (perhaps we should ask ourselves) foster?
Catherine House struck a chord, reminding me of the fear and preemptive nostalgia I felt as my college days came to a close: Would this—living with friends, unscheduled freedom, intellectual stimulation, beautiful buildings, caring mentors—be the best we ever had it? What would you give in order to live suspended in that miniature reality forever? (I’d love to chat with Thomas, a Yale grad herself, about all this.) For most of us, there’s no escaping the rude push of time, except maybe to apply for grad school. But as Ines will discover in brutal, frightening fashion, there is a real choice to be made at Catherine House.
A sidebar about craft: Catherine House made me think a lot about my own college-campus set writing project. I’ve grappled with how much to build out aspects of the characters’ experiences that are important but not absolutely central to the plot—how spicy or explicit I wanted my characters’ sexual experiences to be, differences in backgrounds and identities, their academic work. I thought Thomas did it all economically and effectively. I can see myself rereading chapters for reassurance and inspiration.
The Vanishing Half has no such surrealist or sci-fi elements; its dangers are entirely real and manmade. The story follows identical twin sisters, Desiree and Stella Vignes, from their childhood in the 1940s through middle age, in a world made all too real by the enforcement of America’s invented racial hierarchy. They are light-skinned Black women raised in the small fictional town of Mallard, Louisiana — a town dedicated to the perpetual lightening of Black skin. One of the first things the girls learn about this town is that in spite of the crooked idealism of its all-Black (but “color-struck”) community, racism still threatens from both within and without.
The temptation that lures Stella is passing as white. A smart, serious, disciplined young girl, she sees clearly which opportunities, from education to employment to which doors at the restaurant to which days at the museum, are closed to her as a Black American. And, with her light skin, whiteness seems … within reach. One day, she spontaneously and successfully slips into the white world; she realizes just how much her racial identity is contextual and constructed.
Stella decides to pass, permanently, and disappeares without a trace into white America. While the basic logistics and mechanisms of such a transition are fascinating in and of themselves, the suspense that makes this literary novel such a page-turner comes from Stella’s constant fear of being found out and her battle to maintain her racial position by reinforcing the very racism that so hurt her as a girl.
This tension reaches a climax first when a Black family moves in to her wealthy, gated, not-legally-yet-aggressively-all-white neighborhood in Los Angeles. The pull Stella feels toward connecting with her new neighbor Loretta, but her terror that any connection will put her secret at risk, rends big cracks in her highly-polished exterior. I’m not sure I can convey how electrifying and psychologically brilliant this plot and these pages are. Stella lurches—so believably—between viciousness and solicitousness, and people get hurt.
She sees the cruelty of her own privilege reflected back to her when Loretta and her girlfriends talk about what school Loretta’s daughter will attend. She sees how her belonging with her own circle of friends is dependent on reinforcing their white supremacy. She sees that she is raising a racist white daughter. And though the world is changing around her—if she had known the Civil Rights movement was coming, would she have made the choice she did?—she already gave up her past and her given family in exchange for her present and chosen one. She believes she can only ever have one or the other.
Then Stella is found, quite accidentally, by her niece Jude, a young woman who has come to Los Angeles for college and of course recognizes her mother’s identical twin right away. Jude is “blueblack,” Desiree having married a darker man after leaving Mallard, and this is the most threatening thing of all to Stella.
This book is a great book, period, with a classically readable style (like Going Dutch), strong characters, and an I-gotta-know plot. And I believe it’s also a gift for a white reader like myself to be able to slip into this fictional universe and experience, more viscerally and imaginatively, Black and white racial identity through Stella’s (and the others’) eyes. Seeing whiteness performed by a woman born Black gives the lie to any idea of identity’s fixedness or whiteness as a naturally occurring state; it becomes crystal clear that it has always been a performance.
Stella sees and feels the borders and topography of whiteness with a breadth and clarity most of us, I would guess, do not. She can see it from the outside and feel it from the inside. While many of us may understand intellectually what a weird, flimsy construct our cruel and violent history of racism is built on, it’s another thing to feel it the way Bennett’s book so powerfully makes us do.
