“Gifty, a Stanford fifth-year graduate student in neuroscience, runs reward-circuit experiments on mice while her depressed Ghanaian-born mother lives in her apartment. Gyasi's second novel after Homegoing.”
What's in this book
- Yaa Gyasi's 2020 second novel — a Stanford neuroscience graduate student runs mice experiments while her depressed mother lives in her apartment
- Gyasi's structural pivot from Homegoing's multi-generational scale to single-character interiority
- 272 pages cross-cutting between Stanford lab, Huntsville childhood, and the apartment present",
- Pentecostal-church childhood material is some of the strongest contemporary American literary prose on immigrant evangelical religion
- Bahni Turpin audiobook is the definitive audio production
- For readers of Homegoing, Klara and the Sun, Educated, and contemporary American literary-faith novels
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Transcendent Kingdom is Yaa Gyasi's 2020 second novel, the Homegoing follow-up that re-established Gyasi in a completely different structural register from her debut. Gifty is a fifth-year Stanford neuroscience graduate student running optogenetic reward-circuit experiments on mice. Her older brother Nana was a high-school basketball star in Huntsville, Alabama, who became addicted to OxyContin after a 2008 sports injury and died of a heroin overdose at sixteen. Her Ghanaian-born mother has come from Huntsville to live in Gifty's apartment in the depths of a major depressive episode. The novel runs Gifty's laboratory work, her relationship with the recovering Catholic faith of her childhood Pentecostal church, her on-and-off relationship with another Stanford graduate student, and the slow accumulation of memory from the Huntsville childhood that produced who she has become.
Gyasi's structural method is the close-third-person Gifty interiority with the chapters cross-cutting between her current Stanford laboratory work, her childhood memories of Huntsville, and her relationship with her mother in the apartment. The neuroscience material is rendered with the kind of patient procedural texture (the optogenetics protocol, the surgical implantation, the reward-circuit conditioning experiments, the philosophical debate about whether the mouse model can tell us anything about human addiction or depression) that contemporary American literary fiction rarely commits to. The Pentecostal-church childhood chapters are some of the strongest contemporary American literary prose about a specific kind of immigrant evangelical religious upbringing. The novel's structural argument (that contemporary neuroscience and the prophetic Christianity of Gifty's childhood are both attempts to answer the same set of questions about reward, suffering, and free will) is made through the texture of Gifty's daily attention rather than through any direct argument.
Recommended as required contemporary American literary fiction reading, as the structural pivot Gyasi made between Homegoing and her later work, and for fans of Marilynne Robinson's Gilead and the broader contemporary American literary-faith tradition. The Bahni Turpin audiobook is the definitive audio production. Five stars without reservation.
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