Book Club Recap: Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi

Transcendent Kingdom is definitely a hard book to analyze. The narration is so intricately woven and deftly done that it becomes hard to see what craft devices the author chose to use, and why.

But as always, our book club members did their best to decipher and distill the basic craft elements… and here are our takeaways.

• Structure

It’s become customary that we start our sessions with discussing structure—the story vs. its container (that is, the story itself, and the way the author chose to present it).

The story in this book, chronologically speaking, begins with the narrator’s (Gifty’s) parents meeting and getting married. From then on, they get a son, Nana, and in order to ‘give him the world’ (or at least a better life) the mother makes the decision to move from Ghana to Alabama, USA. After a while, the father joins the rest of the family, and they get another child, Gifty (the narrator). The father can’t cope with the often humiliating life of a Ghanaian immigrant and leaves the family to go back to Ghana, causing abandonment trauma, mainly to Nana. When Nana sprains his ankle at the age of 16, he becomes addicted to opioids, then heroin, which results in his death 2,5 years later. His death triggers his mother’s depression. The story opens when mother takes to bed the second time around, when Gifty is already a grown woman, a neuroscientist working on her PhD in area of reward-seeking behavior and restraint (aka addiction and relapse). We follow her life, up-to-date, and all the ways that her brother’s death affected it.

The container for this story is what we would call a fragmented narrative. The story is not being told linearly or chronologically, but in fragments of now, then, and everything in-between. One chapter can easily contain chunks of text from different periods in the characters’ lives. In other words, the chronological, linear story is told in a non-chronological, non-linear way.

This is an interesting choice. The story lends itself quite nicely to a dual timeline—the first timeline leading up to the first time the mom gets depressed, and the second timeline beginning when mom gets depressed the second time around. Even though this might have been the expected choice, given the story, I feel that fractured narrative actually worked even better. It allowed the author to explore events and periods of her family’s life that she might have had to omit had she chosen to write a dual timeline.

• Passage of time

Closely related to the chosen structure is the issue of passage of time. In a fragmented narrative, the author has to be really careful that the reader knows when they are at all times. To make sure the reader knows when something is happening, the author has to either explicitly state when the event is taking place, or give clues that will indicate the time frame.

Those clues can be anything; a bit of context that places us in a certain time, the way character thinks or behaves (Gifty was different at different points of her life: a rambunctious kid, a heedful teenager, a detached young adult…) Once, the author even used the temperature of the room to ground us in time (since the author made sure we knew Gifty’s lab colleague, Han, liked to keep the lab cool, when Gifty opened a chapter with noticing the coldness of the room, we knew right away we were in the present, in the lab. Goes to show how a simple sensory info can pull double duty).

For the most part, the time jumps were done well, and most of the time, we had no issues orienting ourselves in the timeframe of the story. But there were times (especially when she would mention her mom being in bed, which happened both in the past and in present) when it would take a while for us to understand when we were. Those instances were few and far in-between, though, so they didn’t affect our reading experience drastically.

• Choice of point-of-view

The whole story is told from Gifty’s 1st person POV. And yet, there is a lot of distance in the way the story is told. This prompted an interesting discussion—can a first person POV be non-immersive, even distant (like 3rd person distant, for instance), or is every 1st person POV by definition a Deep (immersive) POV?

Some members argued that every 1st person POV is by default immersive, in that, it is closely tied to this person’s thoughts, emotions, and interiority.

Some members countered that in this particular book, while we were in 1st person POV, it felt rather distant and detached—and so that it is possible to have a distant, even authorial-like 1st person POV.

This made us discuss what makes immersive POV—immersive? Is it the fact that we’re privvy to character’s interiority, or is it how they display that interiority?

My personal opinion (that might differ from some other members’ opinions) is that first person narration doesn’t necessarily mean it’s immersive (deep) POV. First person narration is by default close, but it doesn’t have to be immersive, or even particularly close, for that matter. Gifty is a good example of such a narrator. Her narration is largely report-like, in that, she tells us what happens, but doesn’t dwell a lot on how things feel, or give you an immersive feel of a scene or a situation.

For some members, this was a let-down. They expected a much more emotional tale, something that would engage with our emotions more effectively, given the subject matter at its core. This wasn’t a book that evoked a lot of emotions. For the most part, it engaged the reader’s intellect more than their feelings.

Many of us agreed that this was probably an intentional choice—that the author used this sort of ‘distant’ 1st person POV to SHOW Gifty’s characterization. Meaning, the distant first person POV isn’t there by accident, it’s there to show us who Gifty is as a person: someone who is rational, not very in touch with her emotional side, an over-achiever seeking security in success.

A couple of our members who’ve had family members who were addicts, confirmed that this is a classic response to a trauma caused by a loved one’s addiction—especially sibling addiction. Siblings of addicts seek security (which is a response to not being in control of their sibling’s addiction—something that, while out of their hands, has adverse, even harrowing effects on their own life), and in that search for security they don’t leave anything to chance. They often become over-achievers, who try to create a perfect and safe environment for themselves. They also have hard time relating to other people because of trust issues (broken trust is an inherent problem when it comes to addiction)—which is another trait Gifty exhibits.

In other words, who Gifty became as a result of her brother’s addiction is very much in line with how siblings of addicts react. The narration (out of touch with feelings, factual, exact) is in line with her personality. The way the author uses POV isn’t just a choice in POV, it actually serves to show us who Gifty is as a person.

• Pacing

Many of us thought that the pacing was a bit off. Not that this was a huge issue, or that it affected our reading experiece in a huge way; in a book as well-written as this one these types of ‘mistakes’ are easily forgiven, as there is plenty of positive sides (language use, deep exploration of several interconnected topics, fantastic, crisp voice…) to keep you going.

There were two parts of this book that felt glossed over, though.

The first part was Nana’s addiction. It happens, roughly 50% into the story, and ends at (again, roughly) 75% with his death. This is, of course, just a tentative approximation, given the fractured narrative in the book. Most of us expected the struggle with addiction to make the biggest part of the book (I expected it to mark the beginning of the proverbial act two—25% into the novel, and last until the proverbial end of act two (75% into the novel).

It all happens so quickly: Nana’s leg is injured, he gets OxyContin prescription, gets hooked, and, after merely a couple of scenes or summaries where he breaks stuff in the apartment or where mom and Gifty are looking for him around the town, he dies. For me, this was the part where Gifty was most distant from the reader—despite 1st person POV. So it could be argued that she glossed over this part, because this part of the story was hard for her to relay. Plausible as that may be, I can’t help feeling that I missed something here—emotions, heartrending events, an explanation of how it all came to happen, as well as being in on the emotional ups and downs.

In failing to get closer to these events, the text failed to engage my emotions fully, the way I expected them to be engaged, given the subject matter.

The other part of the story that felt glossed over—which in turn affected the pacing—was the ending. By the time Gifty told us the majority of her family history, it became clear that her character arc is that of seeking connection. Due to a disinterested mother, absent father, and an addicted brother, Gifty has learned to keep people at arm’s length (as demonstrated through her relationships with Anne and Raymond), and by the end of the book it’s increasingly evident that this isn’t something she can keep up. But we don’t really see her reaching out to those closest to her (Han and Katherine). In the very end, we do get an epilogue, where we’re informed she and Han are in a relationship and living together, but we have no way of knowing how this happened—how did Han manage to get through to her? How did he make her open up? How did she defeat her inner demons to be able to be with someone, rely on someone? This would’ve been interesting (and satisfying) to see, and many of us felt like we missed out on the juciest part of the story.

• Characterization and character arcs

Characterization was done extremely well. All these people felt very real to us. They were created through specific details and were very life-like. Their personalities were formed in response to the circumstances they lived in.

Their character arcs, though, felt stagnant for the better part. Most of our members read and write in the Women’s Fiction genre, where the character arc IS the story, so we may very well be biased toward having powerful, evident character arcs. In Literary Fiction, this is not always the case. Even in our last month’s book pick, The Dutch House, the protagonist, Danny, had virtually no character arc.

That said, we saw changes in Gifty’s character—like I said, she was a lively, boisterous child, a pious teenager, and a detached young adult. But these are changes in characterization, not a character arc. There was an opportunity for a character arc in reaching out to people and letting people in. But, due to pacing issues, while it was hinted at, we didn’t get to see it on the page.

• Telling vs. Showing

There were some members who said that the author used a lot of telling. This is especially true when the author talked about science and religion, but also there were a lot of summaries, where we didn’t see events unfold through scenes, but were ‘told’ about them in a form of a summary.

As writers, we’ve all been chastized countless times for telling in our writing, and many of us have developed a radar that blares every time we see telling, either in our or someone else’s pages. But telling is a perfectly valid form of narration—if done well. Every story has its telling parts (explanations, summaries to convey passage of time, or to distill a relationship to its essence…). It just has to be done well (not be jarring, done in an info-dumpy way, or done in an author-intrusion way, etc…) and balanced out against showing. In other words—not all telling is bad, as we’ve been told.

While I personally didn’t mind telling in this book, I can see why some members felt like it overpowered showing. For instance, there was opportunity to show Gifty change through different relationships she had with Anne and Raymond, but we got to see very little of these relationships, and in a summed-up way. We got way much more info on her religious beliefs than on actual relationships with other people.

• Social commentary: religion vs. science, addiction, immigrant experience

Usually, when there’s social commentary in a book, it’s reduced to a single topic: for instance feminism, or privilege, or racism, or modern-day detachment. But Gyasi does a wonderful job of discussing at least three different issues—religion vs. science, the repercussions of addiction, immigrant experience…, but also latent racism, parental abandonment, and more. But it’s not just that she sprinkles in social commentary here or there; it’s that she weaves these different topics together, so that it seems that she’s speaking about one single thing: the science thing feeds into the faith thing, that feeds into the immigrant thing, that feeds into the addiction thing (though not in an expected way but more on that later on). Ultimately, these different topic reflect ONE single experience—shown through these different aspects and angles. This is an amazing achievement. As writers, we know how difficult it is to deliver a single point, let alone to work in all these heterogenous angles that, ultimately, add up to one mega-point.

The social commentary was the part of the narrative that kept me hooked the most. It felt very life-like, true. For instance, many of the members who were raised Catholic felt that Gifty’s ever-changing relationship with religion reflected their own relationship with religion. The issues of seeking solace and salvation in faith during dificult times, but also struggling with Church’s rigid and literal interpretations of scientific and historical facts were rendered very realistically.

Addiction was another aspect of the book we discussed at length. One of our members, Elise Schiller, wrote a powerful memoir, Even if Your Heart Would Listen, about losing her daughter to heroin overdose following an opioid addiction. We were lucky enough to have Elise shed some light on reality of addiction and how it looks in real life (thank you, Elise!)

One of the things we discussed in terms of addiction was whether how Nana got addicted (through OxyContin prescription following a sports injury) was realistic in terms of how most immigrants get hooked on drugs. The general consensus in the end was, that while most immigrant experiences might have some similarities, we cannot (and shouldn’t) assume that they’re all the same. In other words, while it might be true that most immigrants who become addicted to drugs don’t get there through OxyContin prescription, that doesn’t immediately mean that this part of the book wasn’t realistic.

As a Croatian writer, I often find I have to explain myself against similar presumptions, too. Whenever people read about my (Croatian) protagonist, they tend to assume that my protagonist is the epitome of a Croatian woman—hence all her worldviews, opinions, decision, reactions, must be indicative of how ALL Croatian women are/behave. Croatian women are just as diverse in their opinions, worldviews, and reactions as American women (or women anywhere, really). We shouldn’t assume that, because we’re reading about a minority member in a story, that that person’s experience is inevitably the only possible experience for any member of said minority. I guess we owe this effect—this need to unify—to our brain’s need to define and compartmentalize things. We want to define what life is in Africa, in Croatia, in an immigrant family, so we come up with ONE notion, ONE story of Africa, Croatia, immigrants…

But in that need to define and unify, we lose the sight of the fact that every place/social group has not one, but many stories to tell. Hopefully, by being aware that this is something we tend to do, our reading culture will change—and we’ll start reading minority characters in a more open-minded way.

Lastly, while Transcendent Kingdom wasn’t the most emotional book we’ve read so far, it was still a moving and resonant read. It’s also a great example of Literary Fiction—not only because of social commentary or great use of language, but because of writing in postcards—scenes that deepen our understanding of the protagonist’s experience.

With that, I’ll wrap up this month’s book club recap! Hope you enjoyed reading! Until next time—keep safe and keep writing!

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Have you read this book? Did you like it? Let me know your thoughts in the comments!

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