(includes spoilers!)
I bought this book after finding out it was on the Oxford reading list for this term. Naturally, I had high hopes for the book, and, I can assure you, that I was not disappointed. In fact, I was blown away.
I am still struggling to understand how a novel with not even a hundred pages manages to affect me so strongly.
I read the entire book in one sitting, physically unable to put it down, inhaling word after word like it was the only thing that would keep me alive.
Passing is the story of two biracial women, living in New York City in the 1920s, who are able to pass as white women in public. The story primarily follows Irene Redfield, whose family (a husband and two children) does not pass, whereas Clare Kendry, a woman she bumps into in a white-only cafe early on in the book, is married to a white man with a passing daughter. The two women discover they were childhood friends once, before Clare Kendry moved away from their town in order to live her life as a passing white woman in public, beside her oblivious white supremacist husband.
After this chance encounter, the novel follows the continuation of the two women’s complex relationship. Once Irene unearths the racist, unsuspecting husband of Clare’s, she desperately urges Clare to reflect on her decisions, while Clare attempts to convince Irene to pass as a white woman more often and bathe in the luxuries that accompany it.
Despite the short length of the novel, Nella Larson is able to closely explore themes of race and class in America in the early 1900s, with great detail and precision.
I strongly appreciate how well Nella Larson was able to introduce characterisation and the dynamics between different relationships between characters. The growing tension between Irene and her husband is so well written in such a short collection of scenes that it makes you squirm yourself, wishing that her husband would just vocalise his true feelings already!
I also believe this extensively detailed level of character development was also made possible due to the fact that the book follows the character Irene. She is always brimming with a hundred different emotions that she either can’t seem to express, or won’t allow herself to, as she does not wish to be hated by anyone.
The inconsistency within her emotions and actions is definitely a large contributing factor to the ever-growing intrigue building throughout the book that makes it so difficult to put down. She is insistent of these strong morals and beliefs that she holds, yet she seems so conflicted when trying to uphold them herself. Her constant suppression of her true emotions, often frustration, makes the reader feel like they have been included in this confidential scene that is her mind, which none of the other characters ever seem to notice. Additionally, the uncertainty within her actions and unreliability of the progression of her thoughts amplified the shock factor of the ending incredibly.
Larsen intentionally created this beguiling ambiguity within the final scene. Clare kendry falls from a great height to her death after her white supremacist husband storms into a party the two women are attending, consisting of only black guests, claiming he has uncovered her secret and that she will pay for tricking him in this way, concealing the true identity of her race. The ambiguity lies within how Clare ended up falling. Moments before her fall, Irene reached out for her, but it is written in a way that the reader cannot know whether or not she pushed her. Perhaps, at this point, Irene is suppressing her true thoughts even from the reader.
The party stands over Clare’s unmoving body on the ground floor, when Irene is asked if the husband had pushed her. She is quick to defend him, possibly out of guilt for her own actions, or simply out of shock at Clare’s sudden death.
If it was Irene who pushed her, there is this unnerving sense of an unfinished ending, not of the book, but rather for the continuation of Irene’s life. There is a lack of action taken against any suspected killers in the final sentences.
On the other hand, if it was Clare who intentionally fell to her death, Larsen is able to use ehr death as a further depiction of the themes of race in this novel. In order to live a comfortable life with a successful white husband, Clare killed off the side of her that held any black roots in order to pass as white herself. However, towards the end of the book, the reader slowly discovers that Clare has seemed to lost any sense of self-identity through her marriage to a deeply racist man, and, eventually decides that her best option is to kill herself entirely, any remains of her, black or white, held no purpose strong enough for her to keep living.
Either way, the twist ending is spectacularly shocking.
I finished reading the book at around one in the morning, and immediately ran to tell someone all about it. Naturally, everyone in my house was fast asleep so I had to quietly retreat back to my room, but I was still buzzing regardless. The book seemed to give me this unparalleled energy inside of me while reading it, and then for a long time afterwards, until, at last I fell asleep, my mind racing with images of the final scene, and then all of the ones that led up to it so perfectly.
