SYNOPSIS (via Penguin Random House)
Gifty is a sixth-year PhD candidate in neuroscience at the Stanford University 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 an ankle 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. Exquisitely written, emotionally searing, this is an exceptionally powerful follow-up to Gyasi’s phenomenal debut.
PERSONAL REFLECTION by Michael Winters
When I was younger I somehow picked up the idea that faith wasn’t supposed to change. You were supposed to place your faith in Jesus and then you were just supposed to always “believe.” More recently I heard someone teach that Christian maturity requires that your ideas about God will change and this strikes me as true. In church-based ministry over the years I’ve seen many people come to a place where their faith needed to change in order to mature, but instead they just cast aside belief and tried to ignore eternal questions. In reading of Gifty’s childhood faith and what happens as it’s confronted by tragedy and time, we read a testimony of how a life of faith can go. It’s not a triumphant or idealized story, and though it’s fictional, there’s much truth in it.
Transcendent Kingdom was a perfect pick for our Faith in Fiction reading group. Like the name of the group says, we pick books where faith plays an important role in the story, placing faith in the power of fiction to help us better understand life and our place in it. In addition to the themes directly related to faith, Transcendent Kingdom also has so many insights into how relationships work or don’t work, the state of the American dream, and the crisis of addiction and mental health disorders. The book includes some difficult topics and doesn’t shy away from harsh language, but provides a story well worth considering. I, and others in our discussion group, felt the book evoked a lot of empathy, but I also felt judgment toward some of the characters. That’s one of my takeaways—maximize and act on the empathy, and let the judgment fade away. The story makes clear that our words and actions have consequences in others’ faith journeys.
QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION
In Gifty’s early childhood, she has a sweet and honest child-like faith in God. What did you notice about her beliefs before her brother’s death?
Nana’s death is a turning point in Gifty’s life and in her faith in God. What happens to Gifty after her brother’s death? How does she try to cope with this tragedy?
During her PhD studies with mice, Gifty realizes she thinks of the work as holy.
“The collaboration that the mice and I have going in this lab is, if not holy, then at least sacrosanct. I have never, will never, tell anyone that I sometimes think this way, because I’m aware that the Christians in my life would find it blasphemous and the scientists would find it embarrassing, but the more I do this work the more I believe in a kind of holiness in our connection to everything on Earth. Holy is the mouse. Holy is the grain the mouse eats. Holy is the seed. Holy are we.”
What do you make of this?
Pastor John and the Pentecostal church he leads in Alabama are helpful to Gifty’s family in some ways, but they are also revealed to be deeply flawed. How did you feel toward the characters from the church?
On page 44, Gifty describes the scientific question she’s trying to answer: “Could optogenetics be used to identify the neural mechanisms involved in psychiatric illnesses where there are issues with reward seeking, like in depression, where there is too much restraint in seeking pleasure, or drug addiction, where there is not enough?”
She seems to see her mom’s deep depression and her brother’s addiction as two sides of the same coin. Her experiences with them definitely seem to drive her work. What else do you think contributes to her choice of work and the high level at which she desires to perform?
Gifty’s family doesn’t overtly display affection through words or touch. How do they relate emotionally? What’s the style of their communication? And how do you think these ways of relating contributed to the outcomes they experienced?
There are many examples of overt racism described in the book. How did racism affect Gifty and her family?
Gifty says, “I used to believe that God never gives us more than we can handle, but then my brother died and my mother and I were left with so much more; it crushed us. It took me many years to realize that it’s hard to live in this world...But to be alive in the world, every day, as we are given more and more and more, as the nature of “what we can handle” changes and our methods for how we handle it change, too, that’s something of a miracle.”
Toward the end of the book, Gifty retains some sense of her religious upbringing, and the end of the book sees her sitting in an empty church with eyes open, not praying. Do you think there’s been some resolution for Gifty? How did you feel at the end of the book?
Are there any takeaways for you? Any one thing you want to remember from reading this book?