Let’s talk about your relationship with your Father(land)

Let’s summarize quickly and chronologically: Kweku Sai, a Ghanian man, is expelled from Nigeria in the “Ghana Must Go” policy in the 80s.  He becomes a renowned surgeon in Boston where he also has a wonderful Nigerian wife and four intelligent, beautiful children.  After a career-ending indignity, he abandons his family to return to Accra, leaving emotionally damaged children and an overwhelmed wife in his wake.  When he dies (don’t worry, not a spoiler), the family re-convenes in Ghana, and each person (and, consequently, the family as a whole) has to face his/her own dysfunction.

I wanted to like this book but I don’t think I really did.  

Sentences.  They are short.  There are a lot of pronouns.  Narrators, locations, and time frames.  Changing from chapter to chapter.  (Sometimes within chapters.)  There are a lot of short sentences.  Sometimes just a word.  Like this.  Nouns.  Adjectives.  (With parentheses.) (Often.)

This all contributes to a lot of confusion about who is saying what about whom, and when and it bugged me–whenever a new section started, I kind of had to steel myself and plow through, trusting that the author was going to make this all clear eventually.  And she always did, but it seemed like a little too much effort on the reader’s part.  A few oblique, poetic segments are great, and I appreciate the mood she was trying to create, but these were, in my opinion, overwhelming.  300-some pages is a lot of pages for such a choppy, stream of consciousness style.  By the end, I was skimming the descriptions to get to the dialogue and action.

That said, some of those oblique, abstract segments were really very beautiful, wonderfully articulating very deep, weird, uncomfortable feelings: homesickness, family dysfunction, yearning for something you can’t speak.  So in the end, I think the construction of the story served its purpose very well and complemented the ideas threads of dysfunction and secrets.  I also think the editor could have been a lot more ruthless.

I also had mixed feelings about the conclusion of the book.  On the one hand, by the time you get there, it feels as though the author has found her footing, the plot quickens, and the dialogue is much more interesting, and the characters feel fully developed, so it’s by far the best of the three parts.   On the other hand, it bugged me how the whole story seems to tip-toe up to the big shock;  by the time you reach the end, you know the Dark Family Secret is about to be revealed and you can guess it in broad strokes, even if you can’t guess exactly what it is.  (Spoiler sort of: that scene is pretty graphic, which seemed oddly direct for a book that’s written in such an indirect way.  idk.  It bugged me.)

And that gets at my bigger problem with this book, which is that I feel like I’ve read a million variations of “wealthy/privileged nuclear family seems like they have it all but are actually pretty dysfunctional because of Dark Family Secret.”  That this was set in Boston, Ghana, and Nigeria only made this story slightly more interesting for me and the writing style, though it bugged me, helped too.

I liked a lot of things about this book, too!  It’s a poetic exploration of what it means to be a family, what sacrifice and failure are and how we define those both as an individual and as a family, and how that can depend on your culture (whatever that means).  It feels like an answer to questions she was asking herself: how we can know each other so well and still be so distant?  How is it even possible to be American and African?  Can we ever really “get back to our roots”?  etc.  So that’s interesting.

Rating: 3/5.  There were lots of interesting, nuanced ideas, and the flashback/overlap style made the story more engaging than I think it would have been otherwise.  She clearly has a handle on using language to create a mood.  There are also a lot of good musings on family, love, and the immigrant experience. However, I found it difficult to engage with the choppy, disjointed writing style and was put off by the Big Reveal at the end, even though it explained a lot of the character’s previous actions.  I found a lot of the flashbacks and overlapping narratives tedious (especially in the first part of the book where we witness Kweku’s death from four different perspectives but don’t know any of the other characters yet) and think a tough editor could have improved the reading experience quite a bit while preserving the essence of what the choppy style was meant to communicate.