Novel of the week
Francesca Carington
Yaa Gyasi’s debut, Homegoing, was a multigenerational saga about the legacy of slavery. Her equally outstanding second novel, Transcendent Kingdom, smaller in scale, is another graceful exploration of trauma reverberating through a family.
American-Ghanaian Gifty is a PhD neuroscientist at Stanford. Her family of four has halved to two: her father left; her dazzling older brother Nana died of a heroin overdose when she was 11. Now, 17 years later, her mother, paralysed by depression, comes to stay – and Gifty starts to fear two may go down to one. The novel hops between Gifty’s churchgoing childhood in Alabama, marred by racism and her brother’s addiction, and her present work, experimenting on mice to find pleasure-seeking’s neural mechanisms. Restraint and abandon become two sides of the same coin: “Could it get a brother to set down a needle? Could it get a mother out of bed?”
Gyasi’s writing is introspective and intimate. It’s full of questions like these – sometimes lofty, always personal. Gifty calls her mother the “Black Mamba”, “not a cruel woman, exactly, but something quite close to cruel”. She catches herself making a similar face, and thinks: “The thing I feared, becoming my mother, was happening, physically, in spite of myself.” It’s more than physical resemblance – Gifty suffers from excessive restraint, too. She holds back from friends and lovers, denies herself the comfort of religion. She’s swapped the Christianity of her youth for the religion of science, as Gyasi (unnecessarily) spells out. Still, it frustrates her that neuroscience can’t explain what happened to her brother. Both religion and science “have failed to fully satisfy in their aim: to make clear, to make meaning”.
But where faith fails, reflection helps: “If I’ve thought of my mother as callous, and many times I have, then it is important to remind myself what a callus is: the hardened tissue that forms over a wound.”