Recent Reading: Transcendent Kingdom

 

Yaa Gyasi's Transcendent Kingdom, as Walt Whitman said, contains Multitudes. It touches on addiction, the immigrant experience, African-American religion, the relationship between conservative Christianity and elite institutions like Stanford and Harvard, and many other topics. The publisher summarizes the book like this:

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. Her brother, Nana, was a gifted high school athlete who died of a heroin overdose after a knee injury left him hooked on OxyContin. Her suicidal mother is living in her bed. Gifty is determined to discover the scientific basis for the suffering she sees all around her.

But 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. 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.

I think the thing I appreciate most about Gyasi's novel is its lightness. It covers weighty topics like mental illness, addiction, and racism, but it also has a sense of joy that comes through.