Transcendent Kingdom
Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi
This book leapt off the shelf, into my arms, out the door, and into my room, where I read it until I was done. As both a native of Alabama and a former born-again Christian, Yaa Gyasi’s new book, Transcendent Kingdom, felt like the memoir I’d written in my mind, though much better, filled with poetry, and ultimately from a unique perspective that I knew nothing about.
In this utterly breathtaking novel, Ms. Gyasi (author of Homegoing) takes us from Ghana to Alabama to California and back again. She takes us forward and backward, in and out of the narrator’s childhood and adult years with the sort of deft handiwork that only a master of prose can wield.
The main character, Gifty, tells us her life story (so far). In truth, what we learn mainly concerns her relationships and her emotional response to them: her mother’s overbearing religiosity, her father’s disappearing act, her brother’s harrowing addiction. From each of them (and in aggregate), we see the world of a girl with no one to turn to in her perpetual hour of need.
Photo: Penguin Random House / © Peter Hurley/Vilcek Foundation
As Gifty finishes her graduate research in neurobiology at Stanford University, we get a glimpse into her keen mind. We’re given a spot on her shoulder to watch as her experiments with the brains of mice unfold, and how that research correlates to her own past, present, and future. Gifty views her own work as a lens through which to view the world, her world, and to help explain some small part of it — if not to understand it fully.
In Transcendent Kingdom, Ms. Gyasi has written an extraordinary work. The novel feels at times like a memoir, at others a long prose poem, and throughout a reflection on life with and without religion, reason, addiction, friends and lovers, parents.
Perhaps my love of this book stems in part from my connection to some of its source material. That is quite possible. Even so, this magnificent work of fiction ought to leap off shelves into the arms of anyone looking for a great book from a bright literary star.