Gyasi sometimes reminds me of other writers who’ve addressed the immigrant 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 partner: “It embarrassed me to know that I would have been embarrassed to talk about Nana’s addiction with Han,” a sentence whose awkwardness is in the service of its emotional precision. thesis experiment - a study of reward-seeking behavior in mice that self-consciously mirrors her brother Nana’s struggle with opioids. Instead, Gyasi builds her characters scientifically, observation by observation, in the same way that her narrator builds her Ph.D.
“I didn’t want to be thought of as a woman 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 success than Gyasi is in a novel that pits the home culture against the outside world to see which one wins out. Intended to demonstrate osmosis, the experiment, Gifty reflects later, suggested the central question about her and her mother: “Are we going to be OK?” Gifty and her middle-school classmates submerged an egg in various solutions, then watched as it was denuded of its shell, swelling and shriveling, changing shape and color. Gifty, the neuroscience graduate student at Stanford who narrates Yaa Gyasi’s second novel, “Transcendent Kingdom,” compares her relationship with her mother to the first bit of laboratory science she remembers performing. Exquisitely written, emotionally searing, this is an exceptionally powerful follow-up to Gyasi's phenomenal debut.A family in isolation is a kind of science experiment. Transcendent Kingdom is a deeply moving portrait of a family of Ghanaian immigrants ravaged by depression and addiction and grief-a novel about faith, science, religion, love. Gifty is determined to discover the scientific basis for the suffering she sees all around her.īut even as she turns to the hard sciences to unlock the mystery of her family's loss, she finds herself hungering for her childhood faith and grappling with the evangelical church in which she was raised, whose promise of salvation remains as tantalizing as it is elusive. Her suicidal mother is living in her bed. Her brother, Nana, was a gifted high school athlete who died of a heroin overdose after a knee injury left him hooked on Ox圜ontin. Gifty is a fifth-year candidate in neuroscience at Stanford School of Medicine studying reward-seeking behavior in mice and the neural circuits of depression and addiction. Yaa Gyasi's stunning follow-up to her acclaimed national best seller Homegoing is a powerful, raw, intimate, deeply layered novel about a Ghanaian family in Alabama.
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