THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW 13A FAMILY IN ISOLATIONis a kind of science
experiment. Gifty, the neuroscience grad-
uate student at Stanford who narrates Yaa
Gyasi’s second novel, “Transcendent
Kingdom,” compares her relationship with
her mother to the first bit of laboratory sci-
ence she remembers performing. Gifty
and her middle-school classmates sub-
merged an egg in various solutions, then
watched as it was denuded of its shell,
swelling and shriveling, changing shape
and color. Intended to demonstrate osmo-
sis, the experiment, Gifty reflects later,
suggested the central question about her
and her mother: “Are we going to be OK?”
“I didn’t want to be thought of as a wom-
an in science, a Black woman in science,”
Gifty thinks early in the novel; she is no
more interested in the “immigrant cliché”
of the academically successful child whose
striving parents sweat blood for her suc-
cess than Gyasi is in a novel that pits the
home culture against the outside world to
see which one wins out. Instead, Gyasi
builds her characters scientifically, obser-
vation by observation, in the same way
that her narrator builds her Ph.D. thesis
experiment — a study of reward-seeking
behavior in mice that self-consciously mir-
rors her brother Nana’s struggle with opi-
oids. Gyasi sometimes reminds me of
other writers who’ve addressed the immi-
grant experience in America — Jhumpa
Lahiri and Yiyun Li in particular — but less
because of her themes than her meticulous
style, as when Gifty says of her lab part-
ner: “It embarrassed me to know that I
would have been embarrassed to talk
about Nana’s addiction with Han,” a sen-
tence whose awkwardness is in the service
of its emotional precision.
Gyasi’s style here is especially striking
given the time-traveling fireworks of her
enormously successful debut, “Homego-
ing” (2016), an examination of the effects
of African, British and American slavery
on one Ghanaian family over three cen-
turies. Some readers of “Transcendent
Kingdom” may miss the romantic sweep of
that novel and the momentum Gyasi
achieved by leaping a generation and a
continent every few chapters. If “Homego-
ing” progressed in more or less linear fash-
ion, in this book narrative time is more rel-
ative; like one of those rubber balls at-
tached to a paddle, it rebounds between
Gifty’s childhood and her brother’s death
by overdose, her elite education and her
mother’s suicidal depressions. That
bouncing around also beautifully captures
the rhythms of life with a depressive, the
way that the shadows of the past persist in
the present.
While Gifty shares some biography with
Marjorie, a character in “Homegoing” —
both grow up in Huntsville, Ala., and en-
counter a “crazy” person on a trip to
Ghana — the picture of mental illness in
“Transcendent Kingdom” is darker and
more nuanced. Gifty, who prefers evidence
to anecdote, cites a study of schizophren-
ics in India, Ghana and California; while
the Indian and Ghanaian subjects hear be-
nevolent voices, sometimes those of
friends and family members, the Califor-
nian schizophrenics are “bom-
barded by harsh, hate-filled
voices, by violence, intrusion.”
It’s not, as Gifty’s mother sug-
gests, that mental illness is an
invention of the toxic West, but
that the way it’s experienced on
either side of the ocean is differ-
ent, depending on the surround-
ing culture.
Gifty arrives as an undergrad-
uate at Harvard, where the com-
bination of New England
weather and her grief over her
brother leads her to the universi-
ty’s mental health services, to re-
quest a lamp for treating season-
al depression. There’s no device
to combat the brutal frost of
American racism, though, and it
touches Gifty and her family ev-
erywhere they go. Her mother re-
fuses to acknowledge its effects
on her or her husband, but Gifty
knows “she’d seen how America
changed around big Black men.
She saw him try to shrink to size,
his long, proud back hunched as
he walked with my mother
through the Walmart, where he
was accused of stealing three
times in four months.”
Her father eventually abandons his fam-
ily to return to Ghana; her mother seeks
solace in religion, but doesn’t know enough
about the American South to choose a
Black evangelical church instead of a
white one. For Gifty it’s a “spiritual
wound” to worship with people who be-
lieve that Nana’s addiction is unsurprising
because “their kind does seem to have a
taste for drugs” (in fact, a doctor casually
prescribed OxyContin for a basketball in-
jury); that Nana had a chance at a bright
future only through sports; that if an Afri-
can village hasn’t received Christian
teachings, its residents are damned to hell.
There’s an agonizing fulcrum where you
imagine what a Black church might have
done for Gifty and her family, how the
story of their life in America might have
been different.
As in the work of Chimamanda Ngozi
Adichie or the Ghanaian-American short-
story writer Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah,
the African immigrants in this novel existat a certain remove from American racism,
victims but also outsiders, marveling at
the peculiar blindnesses of the locals. Even
as Gifty absorbs “that little throbbing
stone of self-hate that I carried around
with me to church, to school” — a brilliant
mirror image of the gold-flecked black
stone passed down through the genera-
tions in “Homegoing” — inside the house
some of her mother’s preserving distance
sustains her. In one of the novel’s most
beautiful scenes, Gifty’s mother puts on
makeup before going to one of several jobs.
“I’m pretty, right?” Gifty asks her. Her
mother pulls her in front of the mirror andsays in Twi: “Look what God made. Look
at what I made.” Finishing her makeup,
her mother kisses her reflection, then
leaves Gifty alone to kiss her own. The mo-
ment is emblematic of her mother’s fierce
love, which requires a corresponding step
toward self-love from her daughter.
While her father flees the country in hu-
miliation, and her brother and mother take
more interior flights, Gifty responds to
America’s challenges with success, decid-
ing that “I would always have something
to prove and that nothing but blazing bril-
liance would be enough to prove it.” To her
classmates, professors and even her ro-
mantic partners, this dazzling perform-
ance is sometimes inscrutable; unfortu-
nately for the reader, Gyasi sometimes ob-
scures Gifty from us as well. When Gifty
has a romantic relationship with another
girl in college, she muses, “We had kissed
and a little more, but I couldn’t define it and
Anne didn’t care to.” It’s nice that a same-
sex relationship doesn’t occasion conflict
the way it once did in American fiction —but it’s hard to imagine that the child of
evangelical Ghanaian immigrants would-
n’t have at least some internal dialogue on
the subject, whether ambivalent or defi-
ant.
Gifty’s relationships with men are simi-
larly sketchy. The exception is the one with
her lab partner, Han, who comes alive
through small details, like the way his ears
redden every time he and Gifty talk about
anything more emotionally fraught than the
behavior of the mice in her experiment.
Men, though, are not the point. Although
Nana’s addiction is reflected in his sister’s
scientific work, it’s the rich portrait of their
mother — a woman who
pitches between stoicism and
intense vulnerability — that
constitutes the novel’s most re-
warding experiment. “A mat-
ter-of-fact kind of woman, not a
cruel woman, exactly, but
something quite close to cruel,”
Gifty calls her, and yet when
Nana refuses to get off the team
bus at a soccer game that their
mother has missed work and a
day’s pay to attend, she doesn’t
scold him, but quietly takes the
children home and boxes up the
expensive gear. Except when
Gifty refers to her mother as
“the Black Mamba” — in a
childhood journal where each
entry is addressed to God —
she remains unnamed, but she
is the book’s focus and heart.
For this reason, a short, infor-
mation-laden chapter that con-
cludes the novel felt unsatisfy-
ing, seeming to tie up the
strands of this fascinating
woman’s life too quickly.
For most of the novel, Gyasi
refuses to give Gifty’s mother’s
depression a narrative arc, in-
stead showing us the never-ending wait-
ing that relatives of depressives are forced
to endure. Gifty’s mother appears in all her
complexity, her face turned to the wall,
“courting death, practicing for it, even,”
and at the same time as an unbending pro-
tector, washing the vomit off her detoxing
son in the bathtub, telling him that every-
thing will be all right.
“Transcendent Kingdom” trades the
blazing brilliance of “Homegoing” for an-
other type of glory, more granular and dif-
ficult to name. In place of the lyricism of
her first novel, Gyasi gives us sentences
like this one, where the grace comes from
rhythm rather than melody: “I loved Ala-
bama in the evenings, when everything
got still and lazy and beautiful, when the
sky felt full, fat with bugs.” The transcend-
ent kingdom of this Ghanaian, Southern,
American novel is finally not a Christian or
a scientific one, but the one that two wom-
en create by surviving a hostile envi-
ronment, and maintaining their primal
connection to each other. 0Piece of Mind
A young neuroscientist turns to the lab to understand her family’s pain.
By NELL FREUDENBERGER
TRANSCENDENT KINGDOM
By Yaa Gyasi
288 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $27.95.
Yaa GyasiPHOTOGRAPH BY PETER HURLEY/VILCEK FOUNDATION
NELL FREUDENBERGER’Smost recent novel is
“Lost and Wanted.”