Talking with Yaa Gyasi on 'Transcendent Kingdom'

Yaa Gyasi's 2016 debut, "Homegoing," was a critical and commercial success. Her second novel, "Transcendent Kingdom" (Knopf, 288 pp., $27.95), focuses on Gifty, a woman born in the U.S. to Ghanaian immigrants. Gifty's childhood revolves around church; in adulthood, she focuses on scientific research.

Gyasi talked about the tension between faith and science, depicting depression and anti-racism writing.

The tension between science and religious faith is one of the novel's central conflicts. We're living through a period of backlash against science. Did that affect your approach?

A: I suppose if it affected the writing, it was in the understanding that science and culture are inextricable, not least of all because scientists are people who are shaped by their own circumstances and cultures. Those cultures influence what a scientist might notice, the questions she might ask.

This is just one of the many reasons that it's a huge problem that there is a dearth of Black people in STEM, a dearth of women in STEM. It limits the scope of interrogation, narrows the lens. … I think the backlash that we're currently seeing is partly distrust, wherein the distrust is a reaction to an inept, corrupt, confusing or otherwise harmful government, and it's also partly an example of American individualism taken to its worst extreme — the idea that we don't owe anyone anything, when in fact, in the interest of public health, we owe each other quite a bit.

Gifty must navigate her mother's severe depression, which leaves her unable to get out of bed. How did you manage to make inertia compelling?

The first chapter ends with the line, "But my mother, in her bed, infinitely still, was wild inside," and I think using this line as a kind of guide allowed me to combat the inertia that might otherwise be inherent to having a character confined to bed.

Gifty's mother is suffering from depression, but she, as a fully embodied human being like anyone else, is compelling, lively, complicated, real. For me, every scene where she appears is full of propulsive energy. We get to see her through Gifty, and she is fierce, formidable, strong-willed — anything but inert.

Nonfiction anti-racism books by authors such as Ijeoma Oluo and Ibram X. Kendi have been in high demand. How do you view the novelist's role in exploring racism?

Novels are no substitute for real life, and characters in novels are no substitute for real people. I doubt that reading "Homegoing," a novel that, among other things, attempts to examine how racism became institutionalized, has done anything to change the individual and collective actions that perpetuate institutionalized racism. …

I think the novelist's only role is to write her novel. Inherent in that is the inclusion of the environment, but the environment, the racism, is simply a fact, happening all the time.

This book deals with painful issues: mental illness, addiction, racism, immigrants' isolation, difficulties women face in STEM [science, technology, engineering and mathematics] fields. Was it heavy to write?

The research is definitely heavy, as reading about the painful experiences of real people so often is. But writing, for me, is so intimate and not out-of-body, but rather so deeply burrowed into the body that I lose my sense of everything else, including myself. I can't characterize it as heavy or light or anything else. It's just intimate.

Of her research, Gifty says, "The ending, the answer, is never the hard part. The hard part is trying to figure out what the question is, trying to ask something interesting enough, different enough from what has been asked, trying to make it all matter." How does that compare to your writing process?

I think of writing as a form of asking questions, and I often find that I'm turned off by writing that presumes to have all the answers or that comes from a place of certainty. So I suppose that I would say that in my writing practice, the answer is never the hard part, mostly because I never feel like I have the answers. And when I do feel like I have the answers, like I know exactly what I want to say, it usually means that what I'm working on isn't very good, and I'll end up tossing it.