70 THENEWYORKER,SEPTEMBER14, 2020
ends a phone call with “I love you,”
Gifty laughs at her—“I laughed so
hard I started crying.”
O
ne of the most interesting aspects
of this novel is, in fact, that its
narrator is not an especially sympa-
thetic character. Gifty, whose repres-
sions and cruelties eerily mirror her
mother’s, isn’t by any means a system-
atically unreliable narrator, but she is
unreliable enough to remain provok-
ingly vital. That her rigid self-fash-
ioning represents an escape from grief
is something that she acknowledges;
the subtle question the novel raises is
what unacknowledged shame she is also
fleeing. After all, the person who built
“a new Gifty from scratch” is leaving
behind everything that formed her in
Alabama: her immigrant mother, the
Pentecostal Church, the public school
where evolution was not taught, but
also the people yelling racist slurs from
passing cars.
Gifty tells us that she is too diffi-
dent to shine at parties, but that being
Black can help: “It’s remarkable how
cool you can seem when you are the
only black person in a room, even when
you’ve done nothing cool at all.” It’s a
funny line, but the controlled sangfroid
chills to brittleness. Gifty is practiced at
pointing to her repressions, in order to
repress them even further. She thinks of
her mother as callous, and then sympa-
thetically recalls that a callus is “the hard-
ened tissue that forms over a wound,”
apparently unaware that she has just de-
scribed herself. Virginia Woolf said that
there is a spot the size of a shilling on
the back of one’s head, which one can
never see for oneself. Gifty is not about
to ask anyone else to look for her.
Unfortunately, “Transcendent King-
dom” has a few shilling-size spots of its
own—areas that the book refuses to see
with clarity, and in ways that are not sug-
gestive but bewildering. Most impor-
tant, Nana’s downfall remains blurred
and somewhat generic. Gifty insists that
no case study in the world “could show
how smart and kind and generous he
was, how much he wanted to get bet-
ter, how much he wanted to live,” but
the novel fails to provide the evidence.
Perhaps a fall into addiction is all too
often a fall into formula, yet it seems
important for the novelist to search for
the nonformulaic, the brutally specific:
Nana started stealing from our mother.
Small things at first, her wallet, her checkbook,
but soon the car was gone and so was the din-
ing room table. Soon Nana was gone too. For
days and weeks at a time he went missing, and
my mother went after him.
We are hardly surprised when Nana
punches a hole in the wall and smashes
the TV: a continuation of the famil-
iar gestures. At those moments when
Gyasi’s prose is summoned to intense
specificity, it smears into cliché: “On
the nights when he would slink in
through the back door, coming down
from a high, reeking to high Heaven.”
“He’d skulk off to his room and hide
there until the entire event had to be
repeated.” “Nana rolled his eyes and
stomped off, and my mother sighed a
heavy sigh.” On the night that Nana
has been found dead in the parking
lot of a Starbucks, Gifty can tell us
only that “we were blindsided.”
Cliché is our original sin, the thing
we all try to escape, but the offense is
not merely aesthetic or musical; it is
epistemological—cliché blocks our ap-
prehension of reality. In place of sin-
gularity, it substitutes commonality; in
place of the private oddity, it offers the
shared obviousness. What is striking is
that words fail the novel at those mo-
ments when it is most critical that they
succeed. Is it too speculative to suggest
a failure of authorial nerve here, as if,
for Gyasi, the most burning material
cannot quite be stared at? One some-
times has the sense, here and in “Home-
going,” of the great pain of her chosen
subject matter—slavery, addiction, sui-
cide—being soothed into the generic:
Every day, Ness picked cotton under the
punishing eye of the southern sun. She had
been at Thomas Allan Stockham’s Alabama
plantation for three months. Two weeks be-
fore, she was in Mississippi. A year before that,
she was in a place she would only ever describe
as Hell.
Though she had tried, Ness couldn’t re-
member how old she was. Her best guess was
twenty-five, but each year since the one when
she was plucked from her mother’s arms had
felt like ten years.
This is not so much lazy writing as es-
capist writing; the prose seems to swerve
away from direct confrontation and to
settle, instead, for genre.
A similar failure of nerve occurs in
the last chapter of “Transcendent King-
dom,” when Gyasi rushes toward a
happy ending, and dangles a thematic
closure the reader hasn’t requested. One
of the strengths of the book is the way
it follows Gifty’s difficulty in abandon-
ing the vestiges of her Christian belief.
Her conflicts have that quality of sur-
prise which makes a fictional charac-
ter real: she tells us that she stopped
believing in God when her brother
died, but finds herself unexpectedly de-
fending religious faith to her skeptical
Harvard classmates; she uses her lab
research to explain how the brain works,
but remains discontented with both
scientific and religious explanations. To
have found where the brain performs
certain functions is not, she concedes,
to have discovered why it does so. “This
idea that one must necessarily choose
between science and religion,” she an-
nounces, “is false. I used to see the world
through a God lens, and when that lens
clouded, I turned to science. Both be-
came, for me, valuable ways of seeing,
but ultimately both have failed to fully
satisfy in their aim: to make clear, to
make meaning.”
This sounds cogent enough, and
so it is hard to know what to make of
the novel when, on its last page, the
narrator, who now works in a lab at
Princeton, tells us, “I’m no longer in-
terested in other worlds or spiritual
planes. I’ve seen enough in a mouse to
understand transcendence, holiness,
redemption. In people, I’ve seen even
more.” As thought, this seems inco-
herent: What redemption is there in a
mouse? And, “in people,” more of what,
exactly? More transcendence? The
novel has not shown how the narrator
came to select the consolations of sci-
ence over those of religion; on the con-
trary, it has kept the question of how
to choose between them generously
open, until this last page.
It appears that it is the novelist who
is seeking redemption here, to be de-
livered by fusing science and religion
into some mouse model of “transcen-
dence, holiness, redemption.” But it
seems an impoverished way to end a
work so grounded in genuine dilemma
and struggle. We don’t need this novel
to be in the business of transcending
problems when, in its wide fictional
kingdom, it has been so acute in lay-
ing them bare.
