Transcendent Kingdom

 Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi

I came to this book by way of Gyasi's first book, Homegoing, which I loved. For some reason, it's not in my blog -- perhaps I read it before I started keeping it? -- but it was great. It traced slavery's horrors from a village in Africa to modern-day America and back again. The power of the novel was both in its subject and its telling, which subtly tied a thread between seemingly disconnected places and people.

This is a different book. It tells the story of Gifty, whose parents moved from Ghana to Huntsville, Alabama, shortly before her birth. The tragedy that propels this story is not slavery but addiction. Gifty's brother, we learn early in the book, succumbed to an opiate addiction when she was young, destroying her world. His death pushed Gifty toward science, the experimental world of which allowed her to establish order and control over an otherwise unwieldy world and to seek a cure for addiction. Also woven through her life is an internal conflict over faith. Gifty was raised in a deeply religious household, and, though Gifty herself has given up on her mother's religion, she struggles to reconcile the role it continues to play in her life with the ostensibly godless -- or maybe it is god-like? -- impulse of science. And finally there is Gifty's relationship with her mother, which seems to lack affection. Early on, it is dismissed as a cultural difference, but later we learn of the depression that had wracked Gifty's mother since her brother Nana's death. All of these factors come to a head when Gifty's mother moves in with her during the final stages of doctoral research at Stanford.

Transcendent Kingdom just appeared at the top of the best novels of the year in The Week, where it was praised as "'a book of blazing brilliance' that, with its penetrating reflections on science and spirituality..." I didn't find it to be that, exactly. Maybe I wasn't reading closely enough, but those "penetrating reflections" to me actually seemed rather superficial. They weren't embedded in the story for the reader to find for themselves; they were, rather, stated explicitly by the narrator. To me, this is another case of telling rather than showing. The effect was that much of the book read more like an essay than a novel. It felt plotless. Though conflict abounded, it seemed to be ALL conflict, until the book's final pages, when everything seemed to miraculously resolve. The ending felt supremely unsatisfying and unrealistic. I'm not sure what Gifty, or the reader, learns. That addiction blows up more than the life of the addicted? That time heals all wounds? That faith and science can exist simultaneously? Perhaps I need to read it again.