Namwali Serpell's vibrant, intellectually rich debut novel, "The Old Drift," is in keeping in that tradition, and it too refuses to conform to expectations. Novels about the fate of nations tend to be complex affairs, as if the most appropriate literary response to generations of colonialism, violence and bad politics is Henry James' proverbial "loose baggy monster." But what interesting monsters they tend to be: From Gabriel Garcia Marquez's "One Hundred Years of Solitude" to Salman Rushdie's "Midnight's Children" and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's "Half of a Yellow Sun," novelists have developed a particular knack for bringing a freewheeling spirit to a messy, multivalent country.
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