HOMEGOING

 HOMEGOING

by

Yaa Gyasi

    Homegoing is Yaa Gyasi's debut novel, winning the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize, the PEN/Hemingway Award for Best First Novel, the Audie Award for Literary Fiction and Classics, and the American Book Award. It was also shortlisted for The Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize, longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize, and nominated for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, the International Dublin Literary Award, and the Andrew Carnegie Medal.

    In light of all these accolades, it feels presumptuous (and perhaps a tad pretentious) of me to say, but I did not like Homegoing. I very decidedly did not like this book. Part of intense dislike might be unfortunate timing: I undertook Homegoing shortly after completing There There. There are similarities between the two, and those are the parts that I disliked in each; perhaps my dislike is even more intense toward Homegoing because I had just "endured" the same experience with There There. 

    But, like There There, Homegoing feels like a literary fiction wanna be. The modern literary fiction appears to be one that has a plethora of characters and spans a large time frame and/or vast areas. I think the first book like this that I read was The Overstory, by Richard Powers. The Overstory has actually become one of my favorite modern novels; but, when I initially encountered the first part of the book, the part where the reader is introduced to the nine disparate characters, it felt like a collection of unrelated short stories. Other books that I have recently read that are similar to this - with a number of main characters and tracing through time and/or area - include Disappearing Earth, by Julia Phillips, The Weight of a Piano, by Chris Cander, and the abovementioned There There, by Tommy Orange. It might be clever how the authors weave through locations and times, eventually connecting up the multitudinous characters, but as a reader, I found the experiences to be confusing and frustrating.

    And, unlike these novels, Homegoing has at least fourteen major characters. It spans from the eighteenth century to present day, and involves, at the least, Africa and multiple locations in the United States. It felt to me like Gyasi looked at the format of award winning modern novels and decided to make hers even bigger and broader.  But, in addition to this breadth, it felt like the book jumped back and forth; you might be in civil war America in one chapter and back in the African slave trade in the next. 

    I found it all very confusing, and I could not get beyond the frustration to appreciate any redeeming literary value that the book might have. Perhaps this says more about my lack of literary sophistication than about the book; nonetheless, it is my honest opinion of my experience with the book. And, my plebeian opinion does not recommend this book.