Beautiful and deeply realized, Yaa Gyasi’s “Transcendent Kingdom” captures the experience of growing up shaped by trauma–including the shame of trying to hide your own pain.

The novel’s main character is Gifty, the daughter of Ghanian immigrants, raised in Alabama. As the novel begins, Gifty is a Ph.D. student in neuroscience in Stanford–heady stuff. But the news that her mother, mired in a deep depression, is coming to stay with her inspires the type of panic that testifies to a raw relationship, the kind rooted in painful memories and unfinished business.

Gradually, Gifty reveals the walls she’s built up to protect herself from a difficult childhood. Her father abandoned the family when she was young to build a new life back in Ghana. Her loving older brother fell into opiate addiction, with all the chaos and worry that entails, before dying of an overdose. Her mother, harsh at the best of the times, crawled away to bed after her son’s funeral, even attempting suicide. And Gifty, still a child, was stuck trying to deal with it all herself, dealt the loser’s hand of trying to trying to keep everything together when everyone else is falling apart.

Gifty’s family is deeply evangelical, a fact that only intensifies the pressure placed upon her. While she takes some pleasure in the faith of her childhood, she loses it, irredeemably, when her brother dies. But her church remains a community, for her mother in particular, and as Gifty leaves home for bigger opportunities, she also struggles with the worldly classmates who judge her faith…just as she feels they would judge her if they knew everything.

As Gifty juggles her mother’s arrival with the pressure of finishing her Ph.D., she’s really dealing with the larger task of exploring how to stop hiding who she is. Gyasi does an excellent job building a character who’s brilliant and tough and driven but also deeply damaged, with a need to keep others at a distance. It’s a compelling portrait of what it’s like to be an “adult child,” and it uses sure, elegant prose to let us into Gifty’s interior life without stranding us there.

“Transcendent Kingdom” isn’t perfect. There’s a contentious, intimate-verging-unt0-romantice relationship with another student at Harvard that the novel doesn’t seem quite to know what to do with. The book also ends with a jump ahead in time that felt a little too easy for me. Nonetheless, I found it a great read, particularly with anyone who’s seen the impact addiction has on families.

Quotes

“I had never been to therapy myself, and when the time came for me to choose what to study, I didn’t choose psychology. I chose molecular biology. I think when people heard about my brother they assumed that I had gone into neuroscience out of a sense of duty to him, but the truth is I’d started this work not because I wanted to help people but because it seemed like the hardest thing you could do, and I wanted to do the hardest thing. I wanted to flay any mental weakness off my body like fascia from muscle. Throughout high school, I never touched a drop of alcohol because I lived in fear that addiction was like a man in a dark trench coat, waiting for me to get off the well-lit sidewalk and step into an alley. I had seen the alley. I had watched Nana walk into the alley and I had watched my mother go in after him, and I was so angry at them for not being strong enough to stay in the light. And so I did the hard thing.”

***

“I loved Alabama in the evenings, when everything got still and lazy and beautiful, when the sky felt full, fat with bugs.”

***

“She paid for the chips and my sandwich as well, and we headed over to the high-tops at the far end of the shop. It was almost empty save a few undergrads who had made their way over to this graduate student part of campus, probably for the quiet, the decreased chance of recognition. I’d once been like that, so lonely that I craved further loneliness. Even after I’d made a few friends in college, I would still go out of my way to create whatever conditions I needed that might allow me to be alone.”

***

“I didn’t mind that the library was neither cool nor hip. I liked Mrs. Greer with her soda addiction and her dedication to the eighties perm. In fact, if there was anyone at school that year who would have honestly cared about my problems at home, who would have listened to my worries and found a way to help, it would have been Mrs. Greer.

‘I’m fine,’ I told her, and as soon as the lie left my lips I knew that I was going to take care of my mother myself. I was going to nurse her back to health through the sheer force of my eleven-year-old will. I would not lose her.”

I believe Daniel Clowes is always working at another level as a creator. As a reader, though, there are times when I’m not able to meet him there.

“David Boring” is a story about sexual obsession, featuring an achetypal 90s slacker, he of a  morose and clinical bent. He lives with a lesbian roommate and keeps a half-pornographic scrapbook in which he tries, Truman Show-style, to chimera together his ideal woman.

David observes his own life with a kind of clinical detachment that seems very sophisticated to people in their early twenties. That vibe, and the book’s largely adolescent attitudes about sex and scoring, were off-putting, even if Clowes isn’t oblivious to the fact. As one of David’s later girlfriends says, “Just because you’re cold and distant doesn’t mean you’re smart.”

Still, “David Boring” has more to offer than just first-time-in-the-big-city longing. Society seems on the verge of collapse; there’s talk of terrorists and plague. Even if we don’t see that disorder firsthand, it’s enough to drive our characters to an isolated beach house, the very place where David had his first romantic experiences, the very one he’s obsessively trying to return to.

The larger mysteries become intriguing as they broaden to include affairs and murder. It builds to a fascinating read, with memorable moments and characters. Through it all, though, David remains too flat, at least outwardly, to really connect with.

An engaging page-turner, William Gibson’s “The Peripheral” offers a richly detailed sci-fi future populated with some tough characters looking to get theirs.

The novel flip-flops between two settings 70 years apart. The far-future setting takes place after the “Jackpot,” a slow-rolling catastrophe that wiped out much of humanity, leaving crime families and high-tech builder bots in its place. The past setting is a crummy Wal-Mart future filled with drones and drug manufacturers and veterans still glitching from the ghosts of their combat haptics.

The two settings meet through some cryptic server, one that allows for the flow of information, and thus money. People can even cross the barrier if they make use of neural cutouts to transfer their consciousnesses to genetically engineered bodies: the “peripherals” in the title. Still, the connection is mostly a novelty…until one of the visitors from the past witnesses a murder, sparking a cross-time arms race between those seeking to identify the killer and those seeking to hide him.

The tech and the characters are gritty and believable. Gibson always does a good creating settings that are down and out, with characters struggling to get by; he nails what it’s like to be broke. He also has a knack for reckless characters, impatient sorts with a bias toward big swings. “Rigorously selected by the military,” as one puts it, “for an unusual integration of objective calculation and sheer impulsivity.”

The book starts slow, but once the conflict incites, the jockeying escalates exponentially. The future folks shake the past’s economy like a piggy bank, risking destroying the whole thing to get their side on top. Killers are dispatched, bombs deployed, “assemblers” directed to reduce human bodies to their atomic components. It’s exciting stuff.

As caveats go, I think the lead character, Flynne, is likeable but ends up feeling “down-home” in a forced kind of way, one exacerbated by a male author writing a female character. Similarly, while the plot builds some wonderful complications, the finale sees them resolved too easily. (Or maybe I was just too keyed-up for a Matrix style betrayal by a key character that never arrived.)

“The Peripheral” is intelligent, insightful and future-looking in the best tradition of Gibson’s work.

Blunt and visceral, “There There” jumps between a cast of largely Native American characters as Oakland prepares for a big powwow. In crafting these voices, Tommy Orange shares stories of trauma, addiction and good-old twenty-first century anxiety, all while exploring the larger, impossible theme of “what it means” to be Native American.

On the whole, the cast of the novel isn’t doing that well. Even the best of the bunch are trying to find the energy to lose weight and get out of mom’s basement or trudging the same mail route they’ve had for decades while trying to scrape enough cash together to raise three step-grandkids. Others are barely holding on: they’re shakily sober, selling drugs or trying to figure out how to pay back large sums of cash to seriously shady people.

Orange gives us chapters devoted to each member of his cast as the book progresses, moving forward and backward through time, seeing lives cross and reconnect. His phrasing is direct–overly direct as the novel starts, like a conversation you might overhear on the bus.

I found myself longing for more lyrical passages, but I also found myself drawn in as I spent time with the characters. The flatness of the voices seems almost like a protective facade as we learn more about their hopes and failings and, most notably, the deep disappointments etched into their lives.

Everything builds to the powwow, and the book earns its explosive finale. Orange shows us an example of the trauma that has marked his characters’ lives, but he does so without cheapening it.

Quotes

“I’m twenty-one now, which means I can drink if I want. I don’t though. The way I see it, I got enough when I was a baby in my mom’s stomach. Getting drunk in there, a drunk fucking baby, not even a baby, a little fucking tadpole thing, hooked up to a cord, floating in a stomach.”

“‘Listen, baby, it makes me happy you want to know, but learning about your heritage is a privilege. A privilege we don’t have. And anyway, anything you hear from me about your heritage does not make you more or less Indian. More or less a real Indian. Don’t ever let anyone tell you what being Indian means. Too many of us died to get just a little bit of us here, right now, right in this kitchen. You, me. Every part of our people that made it is precious. You’re Indian because you’re Indian because you’re Indian,” she said, ending the conversation by turning back around to stir.”

“Jacquie isn’t listening anymore. She always finds it funny, or not funny but annoying actually, how much people in recovery like to tell old drinking stories. Jacquie didn’t have a single drinking story she’s want to share with anyone. Drinking had never been fun. It was a kind of solemn duty. It took the edge off, and it allowed her to say and do whatever she wanted without feeling bad about it.”

A gripping post-apocalyptic tale, “Station Eleven” skillfully captures the collapse and aftermath of “the Georgia flu.”

Author Emily St. John Mandel adds a welcome wrinkle, though, in introducing the Traveling Symphony into the world after. She places us among a troupe of actors and musicians who loop around Michigan’s mitten, entertaining the small communities that remain with Shakespeare and symphonies while dodging cults and creeps trying to Mad Max their well through the End Times.

By placing us with the Symphony, and using flashbacks to conjure the connected lives of an actor, an artist, a paparazzo and other creative types, St. John Mandel conjures something more literary than your standard post-disaster fare. As the Traveling Symphony’s motto (lifted from Star Trek) reminds us, “survival is insufficient.”

Her characters are sensitive, vulnerable, and often flawed. She does a good job showing us how their heartbreaks and imperfections made them the people they now are, even as the flu, with its 99% mortality rate, made the world we see in these pages.

The interconnections between the characters are deftly drawn, but I did find my disbelief strained as the different threads overlapped at the book’s conclusion. St. John Mandel also cheats a little to undermine the darker ending the book seemed to be building toward. Still, “Station Eleven” was an exciting, engaging read.

Quotes

“This was actually the main difference between twenty-one and fifty-one, he decided, the sheer volume of regret. He had done some things he wasn’t proud of. If Miranda was so unhappy in Hollywood, why hadn’t he just taken her away from there? It wouldn’t have been difficult. The way he’d dropped Miranda for Elizabeth and Elizabeth for Lydia and let Lydia slip away to someone else. The way he’d let Tyler be taken to the other side of the world. The way he’d spent his entire life chasing after something, money or frame or immortality or all of the above. He didn’t really even know his only brother. How many friendships had he neglected until they’d faded out? On the first night of previews, he’d barely made it off the stage. On the second night, he’d arrived on the platform with a strategy. He stared at his crown and ran through a secret list of everything that was good.”