I read Yaa Gyasi’s debut novel Homegoing a little over three years ago, because my daughter had been assigned it in her high school English class and said it was good but “grim.” I thought it was marvelous, and also grim, but beautifully crafted with a series of compelling characters through the time-shifting narrative.
Her second and still most recent novel, Transcendent Kingdom, has a far more conventional structure and is built around a single family of four, only two members of which, the daughter Gifty and her mother, are still around in the present day, although we don’t learn immediately where her brother Nana and father are or if they’re even still alive. Gifty is a graduate student in neuroscience at Stanford, while her mother, a Ghanaian immigrant, lives alone in Alabama; Gifty gets a call that her mother has taken to her bed in a severe bout of depression, so she brings her mother to California to take care of her. We learn that this isn’t her mother’s first such episode, and the recollection brings us the story of Gifty’s father, brother, and how Gifty turned away from the devout Christianity of her childhood and towards the science she hoped would explain everything that religion couldn’t answer.
This isn’t a huge spoiler, since it’s mentioned on the back of the book, but if you want to know nothing stop reading here … Nana died of a heroin overdose after a doctor gave him Oxycontin for an ankle injury Nana suffered playing basketball. Gifty wants to learn about the neuroscience of addiction, to understand why someone would be unable to stop when they know it’s hurting them, killing them, and hurting everyone who cares about them. She was about eight years younger than her brother, and watching him go from a lively, popular kid who seemed to be going places to a zonked-out addict, and a thief, and worse has shaped huge swaths of the last eighteen years of her life. It forced her to grow up and take more charge in the house than someone her age should have to do, it broke her faith in God (but not her mother’s), and it turned her inwards, especially when it came to talking to anyone outside of her family about her brother – or even that she had one.
As someone who grew up with religion, devout perhaps in my blind belief but not exactly in practice, but who is secular now, I found particular resonance in Gyasi’s descriptions of Gifty now, knowing something is gone and won’t return, but that there is no regaining it. Religion serves a purpose for many people, and often becomes a core part of one’s identity, but if you lose your faith, as Gifty does and as I did, you can’t simply go to the God store and buy a new one. Once you realize it’s not true, the spell is forever broken. That absence is real, and you may grieve for all that once was, from your belief in a benevolent God to the hope of an afterlife to the fact that so many adults told you these things were true when they’re not. (I recognize not everyone shares my nonbelief, of course.)
Beyond the question of religiosity, Transcendent Kingdom functions as a different sort of coming-of-age novel: The protagonist loses her innocence about the world, and then spends the next eighteen years following one narrow path that she believes will help her make sense of it. Her mother returning to the isolation of her bed and near-total silence bookends the period of Gifty’s quest for an answer to everything, from why Nana fell so quickly into addiction and death to why their mother is so prone to these severe depressive episodes. Faith couldn’t answer these questions, so why can’t science? This structure also allows Gyasi to retell parts of Gifty’s story that don’t involve Nana or their mother, including her time at a certain college in the Boston area and her tenuous relationships with people around her at Stanford. The novel puts Gifty together piece by piece in front of us, jumping back and forth in time to show how she got to this point of a sort of crisis of unfaith.
It’s hard to avoid judging Transcendent Kingdom by the standard of its predecessor, which was a completely different sort of book and wowed with its structure and scope. This is a small novel about a big character, and it doesn’t cast the same sort of spell that Homegoing did. It’s just different, but still has Gyasi’s easy, thoughtful voice, and shows her developing a single character to a much greater extent than she could possibly have done in Homegoing’s staccato stories.
Next up: About to finish Naomi Novik’s Uprooted.
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