THENEWYORKER,SEPTEMBER14, 2020 69
tation slavery, emancipation, Recon-
struction, the Jazz Age, the civil-rights
movement—all are quickly notched
onto the belt of the narrative, and sud-
denly the great inevitability of the book
seems closer to predictability. The links
between the characters begin to feel
forced. The writing lapses into the kind
of stick-on prose that often besets the
historical saga.
G
yasi’s second novel, “Transcendent
Kingdom” (Knopf ), is a very differ-
ent book, and, I think, a better one—
contemporary, personal, acutely focussed
on a single family, and intensely felt,
where her début was wide and sym-
phonic, its sympathies scored for many
parts. This novel is narrated by a twenty-
eight-year-old Ghanaian-American
named Gifty, who, like Marjorie in
“Homegoing,” has a Stanford connec-
tion and grew up in Huntsville, Ala-
bama. (Gyasi herself was born in Ghana,
grew up in Huntsville, and went to
Stanford.) Gifty is a graduate student
in neuroscience. In her Stanford lab,
she works on reward-seeking behavior
in the brain: she studies why some mice
persist in pressing a lever that they hope
will provide them with a sweet hit of
Ensure even when they are likely to be
repaid by random electric shocks, while
other mice apparently learn their les-
son and desist.
Gifty has one of those significant
occupations which are almost always
thematically overdetermined in con-
temporary novels. In fact, such portents
surround her. Her beloved older brother,
Nana, a talented basketball player,
died of a heroin overdose as a teen-
ager, when Gifty was eleven; their
mother sank into a severe depression
and tried to commit suicide. As the
novel opens, Gifty’s mother has col-
lapsed again, and has travelled from
Huntsville to her daughter’s apartment
in California, where she spends all day
in bed, almost mute. Gifty insists that
she took up neuroscience not out of
any sisterly duty to Nana but because
it seemed the hardest thing she could
do, and, she says, “I wanted to do the
hardest thing. I wanted to flay any men-
tal weakness off my body like fascia
from muscle.” But she also hopes that
her research will one day help explain
human illnesses like depression, “where
there is too much restraint in seeking
pleasure, or drug addiction, where there
is not enough.” In the course of the
novel, she becomes increasingly at-
tached to a particular mouse, an En-
sure addict that can’t stop pressing the
reward lever. This mouse has a limp:
Nana’s addiction to opioids began with
an OxyContin prescription he was
given when he injured his ankle on
the basketball court.
“Transcendent Kingdom” quickly
falls into a back-and-forth rhythm of
present and past. In the present, Gifty
struggles to rouse her afflicted mother,
tells us about her work, socializes with
friends and colleagues. But the emo-
tional undercurrents of her life are al-
ways pulling her back to Huntsville.
The two characters at the heart of the
novel, Gifty and her mother, nick-
named by her daughter the Black
Mamba, are at once blazingly inter-
esting and, by authorial design, frus-
tratingly opaque, for both are studies
in repression. Gifty’s mother, a Gha-
naian immigrant, has a wary resistance
to things American, and a tense anx-
iety around questions of intimacy and
self-knowledge. As a remembered char-
acter—as the young mother of two
children—she is captured by our nar-
rator in abbreviated moments and ep-
isodes, stray sayings and opinions. She
is certainly the novel’s central triumph,
though she is always wriggling to the
side of the narrator’s lens—in part be-
cause her long hours outside the home
(she works as a caregiver for two other
families) mean that she is rarely with
her own children. Her mother became
the family’s only parent and breadwin-
ner after Gifty’s father abandoned them
to return to Ghana.
The Black Mamba is also temper-
amentally elusive; Gifty can’t decide
whether her mother is cruel or not.
The woman certainly isn’t inclined to
the soft overparenting of the West.
(Gifty recalls, “I’d spent my whole
childhood slipping teeth under my
pillow at night and finding teeth there
in the morning.”) When her children
tell her they don’t believe in ghosts,
she chides them for becoming too
American. Robustly animistic, she dis-
dains therapy and considers mental
illness an invention of the West (“along
with everything else she disapproved
of ”). Her faith, performed with relish
at a local church, is a mixture of Pen-
tecostal Christianity and old-country
optimism: “Bring on the speaking
in tongues, the signs and wonders.
Bring on the witch doctor, too, if he
cares to help.” Gifty notes that when
her mother talks to friends on the
phone in Fante she becomes girlish
and gossipy; in English, she is meek
and halting. What Gifty’s mother re-
ally desires, what makes her happy,
remains unclear; life is generally too
tense for the relaxation of self-expres-
sion or self-exploration.
The novel is full of brilliantly re-
vealing moments, sometimes funny,
often poignant. When Gifty is asked
by her science teacher to buy corn syrup
for an experiment, her mother com-
plains about the expense. But when the
teacher, hearing about the complaints,
finds a free bottle for Gifty in her stor-
age closet, the Black Mamba erupts in
shame and yells at her daughter to “take
it back, take it back, TAKE IT BACK.”
When Nana’s gigantic adolescent ap-
petite threatens the straitened domes-
tic budget, the Black Mamba waters
down the orange juice and hides food
around the house.
At one point, Gifty remarks that
her mother lost her native country, her
husband, and then her son—an evis-
ceration that has left her in an uneasy
and exposed alliance with her daugh-
ter. The uneasiness has partly to do
with an unacknowledged similarity
of temperament. Gifty’s mother re-
sponded to Nana’s death by collaps-
ing into a fiercely denied depression;
Gifty has responded to Nana’s death
by shrinking into a fiercely defended
perfection. She wants, above all, to
be “good,” and has chosen science
because the discipline offers a well-
defined path to that goodness. The lit-
tle girl who at the age of eight read
the Bible from cover to cover is no
longer a Christian, but she still craves
rules and prohibitions. She is censo-
rious, a little priggish, awkward, shy.
She goes to Harvard as an undergrad-
uate and boasts to the reader that she
built “a new Gifty from scratch.” She
tries never to speak about her brother;
to a boyfriend at Stanford, she pretends
to be an only child. When her mother
incautiously (and uncharacteristically)
