Yaa Gyasi’s debut novel “Homegoing,” in 2016, was a sensation. That epic story of eight generations of a family of Ghanaian-Americans won prizes and put Gyasi on everyone’s list of writers to watch. This second novel is also a great success, a bestseller and critically acclaimed. Shorter in chronological scope, it is intense and unapologetically challenging.
The narrator, Gifty, raised in Huntsville, is a genius, a Harvard graduate and now a PhD candidate at Stanford University, doing very sophisticated neuroscience work in her laboratory. Her experiment involves first getting mice addicted, so they will endure any pain to keep getting their reward—in this case the healthy drink Ensure—and then finding a way to stop the addicted mouse from seeking his pleasure. This is not an abstraction for Gifty. After a perfectly ordinary ankle injury playing basketball in high school, her brother became addicted to prescribed Oxycontin, then heroin, then overdosed. We are told of his descent, his attempts at recovery, his treatments, his relapses. The addiction absolutely controlled his life and then killed him.
The pain of this inexplicable tragedy drives Gifty’s mother into a depression so dark, so complete, that she cannot get out of bed for days at a time and may herself die of grief. Gifty herself is altered, through loss and shame, forever. Her family had immigrated from Ghana. Her father, called here the “Chin Chin Man,” abandoned them and returned home, leaving his family to face financial hardship and racism in America without him.
Gifty herself refers to a college course involving books “of generational trauma among diasporic communities” and I realized that in just the past few weeks I have reviewed volumes of short stories about Cameroonian Americans and Zimbabwean Americans, so there is definitely such a genre. Gifty explains how she anesthetizes the mice, then drills and exposes the brain. Then, to put it simply, and Gyasi doesn’t, injects different chemicals to see if addiction can be reversed. She seeks to block “the neural circuits of reward-seeking behavior.” This plot would suffice but “Transcendent Kingdom” takes on more than just the research into optogenetics.
There is also a serious religious/philosophical debate. Although her fellow researchers are for the most part devoted atheists, Gifty herself has been saved, is a Christian, and although not conventionally religious, knows she has felt something real: “a loud knocking on her heart’s door.” “It was as real as anything a person can feel,” and she cannot deny it. Humans, she reminds us, perhaps alone among the animals ask “why?” “Why do we exist?” “What is the point of it all?” For Gifty, nihilism is an unacceptable answer, and to those whose solution to the drug problem is “just say no” she replies that would be fine except that we are humans, “the only animal in the known world that is willing to try something new, fun, pointless, dangerous, thrilling, stupid, even if we might die in the trying.”