USA TODAY International Edition
‘ Transcendent Kingdom’ is profound, moving
Making sense of the human soul is the providence of faith and art, not science. What, for that matter, even is a soul, and where does it reside? Is it in the neural pathways that transmit pleasure and pain, in which an opioid addiction can take root? In the slowed production of neurons that fogs the mind with depression?
And if a piece of the soul could be found in the brain, the most mysterious of human organs, could it then be saved? A scientist uses her limited tools to try in Yaa Gyasi’s “Transcendent Kingdom” ( Knopf, 288 pp.,
eeee), a stealthily devastating novel of family, faith and identity that’s as philosophical as it is personal.
Gifty had long stopped calling the soul a soul. The only American- born member of her Ghanaian family, Gifty is pursuing a doctorate in neuroscience at Stanford, a far way physically and spiritually from her evangelical roots in Huntsville, Alabama.
In her clean and ordered lab, she experiments on mice, seeking to identify and alter the neural mechanisms of pleasure- seeking, and by so doing, make sense of the diseases that have gutted her family: addiction and depression. Could her research lead to a cure to either? “Could it get a brother to set down a needle? Could it get a mother out of bed?”
That brother – Gifty’s older brother, Nana – is long dead, a young casualty of opioid addiction after a basketball injury and a careless Oxycontin prescription. Once an electric athlete, he was reduced by drugs to animal need, chasing highs for three years until he was found dead of an overdose. The loss traumatized Gifty’s mother, whose debilitating depression comes in waves. The most recent wave brings her from Alabama to stay with Gifty, bedridden in the catatonic thrall of a major depressive episode as Gifty searches for answers in mice.
The first- person narration deftly hops through time, the details of Gifty’s past informing our understanding of her present: Her family’s immigration from Ghana; the abandonment of her father, who returns to Ghana to start anew and never looks back; the racism of the deep
South, both casual and cutting – a boy in kindergarten telling Gifty she’s not a princess because “Black people can’t be princesses,” and the old man with Parkinson’s her mom cared for calling her the n- word every day; the journal entries young Gifty began with the words “Dear God,” praying sometimes for her brother’s death to be freed from his addiction.
Gifty’s voice is restrained and matter- of- fact. She speaks with the remove of a clinician, observing her thoughts and feelings with the same reserve as she does her mice. She dissects to understand.
Her guarded control doesn’t lessen the reader’s connection to Gifty; it only intensifies the story’s emotional wallop.
It’s bravura storytelling by Gyasi, so different in scope, tone and style from her 2016 debut, “Homegoing.” That, too, was brilliant literature, as expansive as “Transcendent Kingdom” is interior, following one family’s descendants through the generations on opposite sides of the African slave trade. The range Gyasi displays in just two books is staggering.
Gifty may not ultimately make sense of the soul in her scientific experiments, but Gyasi does through her art. “I used to see the world through a God lens, and when that lens clouded, I turned to science,” she writes. “Both became, for me, valuable ways of seeing, but ultimately, both have failed to fully satisfy in their aim: to make clear, to make meaning.”
“Transcendent Kingdom” makes clear, and makes so much meaning.