I am an outlier on this work. Yaa Gyasi writes like a motherfucker and I will continue to seek out her work, but this book just wasn’t for me. Transcendent Kingdom aims for big, heavy topics but its treatment of them never feels more than surface level.
This work stands in stark contrast to Homegoing, and while I can see the impulse to go for a different tack there’s such a bare bones approach to the very heavy topics that Transcendent Kingdom attempts to wrangle with – race, depression, and addiction to be specific – that I had a difficult time tracking what Gyasi was after. In fact, it reminded me in that way of We Are Our Completely Besides Ourselves. There was so much that Yaa Gyasi did well, but unfortunately, it’s all the mechanical stuff, the imagery, the word choice. The character growth, development, and pacing are all lackluster and was very clumsy. The narrative is also broken up and told with flashbacks and memories interspersed throughout instead of in a chronological way which only increases the meandering feeling of the book. This is neither an effective character study nor a heavily plotted work. It just is, and that’s a shame.
This book is interested in asking questions about the interplay of religion and science and looks at it through the lens of familial loss and addiction. Transcendent Kingdom is largely composed of Gifty’s recollections and her internal monologue. In that way we are locked with her in her present as 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. But… Gifty has shallow character growth. She was detached and emotionless, which is characteristic of someone undergoing profound PTSD (which she is, full stop, not going to argue that fact about this character as her clinically depressed mother is living in her bed) but Gyasi leaves it unexplored. Since the anecdotes are told in retrospect instead of in the moment there is no obvious difference between Gifty as an adult and a child, specifically as refers to her brother, Nana, who was a gifted high school athlete who died of a heroin overdose after a knee injury left him hooked on OxyContin. At the end of the book Gyasi has Gifty tell us she’s made progress, but we don’t see it. We don’t see her create a healthy romantic relationship with Han, or even in it, we are just told it exists and given a hand wave of reassurance that he truly knows her, that’s she’s let him. We are told that Gifty and Han are with her mother when she finally passes away, years later in her own home, in her own bed, having been taken care of by a home health aid as she had once been. We hear that she is running her own lab at Princeton as she wanted to (well, she wasn’t specific about the wished-for university, but Gyasi does like to give Gifty only the best), but we don’t see her in that space leading as she wished she was led. The book is in the gap between the penultimate and final chapters, and we are denied it.
