“Homegoing”

Yaa Gyasi

Knopf, $26.95

“Homegoing,” the wildly ambitious debut novel by 26-year-old Yaa Gyasi, tackles some 250 years of history on two continents. It’s a novel that seems to have been inspired by such disparate family sagas as Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” Alex Haley’s “Roots” and Thomas Mann’s “Buddenbrooks,” a novel that sets itself the daunting task of tracing the legacy of sorrow that slavery has left on eight generations of one family.

It’s impossible not to admire the ambition and scope of “Homegoing,” and thanks to Gyasi’s instinctive storytelling gifts, the book leaves the reader with a visceral understanding of the savage realities of slavery and the emotional damage that is handed down, over the centuries, from mothers to daughters, fathers to sons.

Gyasi’s workmanlike prose and brisk jump-cuts from one generation’s woes to another’s, though, mean that “Homegoing” never creates the sort of fully imagined fictional world that “One Hundred Years of Solitude” did.

As a result, “Homegoing” often feels deliberate and earthbound: The reader is aware, especially in the American chapters, that significant historical events and issues (like the Great Migration and the incarceration of African-American men today) have been shoehorned into the narrative, and that characters have been made to trudge through experiences (like chain gangs and heroin addiction) meant, in some way, to be representative.

The novel features alternating chapters, set on the Gold Coast of Africa (which would later become Ghana, where Gyasi was born) and America (where she grew up and went to school). It traces the lives of two half sisters, Effia and Esi, and their offspring.

“Effia the Beauty” is married off to a wealthy Englishman, who helps oversee operations at Cape Coast Castle, a fortress and British trade headquarters. Esi, the daughter of an Asante warrior, is captured and sold to the British; unknown to Effia, she winds up in the fetid dungeons of the Castle before being shipped off to America as a slave. Esi survives her travails by developing a hard heart; when her daughter, Ness, is taken from her and sold in 1796, Esi does not even cry or reach out to her.

Ness and her husband, Sam, will risk their lives in a desperate bid for freedom; they will sacrifice so that their son, Kojo, might grow up a free man.

These efforts to break free from the past are made by many of both Esi and Effia’s descendants. The impetus is usually love — love for a man or a woman that offers them the promise of a new life; or love for a child, who might enjoy the freedoms and opportunities they never had themselves.

It’s when Gyasi focuses on relationships — between parents and children, wives and husbands — that her writing is at its most potent. At those moments, we feel we are not getting a history lesson, but hearing the stories of individual men and women we have come to know and understand.