Johanna Thomas-Corr, The Sunday Times
The Nigerian author’s long-awaited book, her first since Americanah, is a magnificent achievement — a big, noisy tale full of wit and compassion
Cast your mind back a decade or so ago and you may remember a brief vogue for big-name novelists delivering rallying cries for a more tolerant world.
George Saunders shared all the ways he wished he had been kinder; Zadie Smith spoke up for human relations; Ian McEwan extolled free speech.
Some of these addresses at American universities went viral. But the one that really caught fire was a 2012 TEDx talk titled We Should All Be Feminists by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, later published as an essay-length book.
The Nigerian writer, then 34, delivered an argument for gender equality that bristled with wit and dissatisfaction.
“Gender as it functions today is a grave injustice,” she said. “I am angry. We should all be angry. Anger has a long history of bringing about positive change.”
Beyoncé sampled the speech for her single Flawless and suddenly this acclaimed author of two novels — Purple Hibiscus (2003) and the prizewinning Half of a Yellow Sun (2006) — was a global icon, the novelist who had conquered pop culture.
That all seems a long time ago, doesn’t it? Since then we’ve cycled through culture wars, Donald Trump, #MeToo, Black Lives Matter, Covid, the woke reformation and a vengeful counter-reformation.
Adichie has had it from pretty much all sides. In 2017, after she drew a distinction between the experiences of trans women and biological women, she claimed to have had interviews, prizes and talks cancelled.
Fiction now appears to be the safer place for an author to embed and humanise their politics, especially if they don’t conform to any one ideological tribe.
Dream Count, Adichie’s first novel since her bestselling Americanah in 2013, is a scintillating account of the trials of four African women living on both sides of the Atlantic who are connected by blood, friendship and employment.
In some ways it’s like a novelised version of We Should All Be Feminists, in that it reads as a compendium of every hardship women and girls can endure: agonising menstruation, genital mutilation, lonely childbirth and sexual assault.
Most of all it depicts in vivid — and often entertaining — detail the pressures on women to marry and have children with men who are feckless, foolish, arrogant, deceitful, egotistical, cowardly and violent, or a combination of these traits.
But it’s testament to Adichie’s gifts that it is no grim misandrist slog but a comedy of manners with an irresistible vitality.
The first section is narrated by Chiamaka, or Chia, a dreamy Nigerian travel writer whose wealthy Igbo family pays for her pampered lifestyle in Maryland. Isolated in lockdown, she wonders, “Have I made the most of life?”
Expensive handbags and first-class travel have not protected her from boyfriends who have paid her too little respect. We’re treated to a roll call of men with fragile egos, the funniest being the most pretentious.
There’s the left-wing art historian Darnell, “the Denzel Washington of academia”, who “didn’t feel any emotion but could talk about the semiotics of emotion”.
Then there’s the shy English writer whom Chia meets on a Jan Morris fan site, who wears a battered leather jacket and talks nostalgically about crumpets, but turns out to be married.
It’s the sharpest portrait of the low-energy literary English male I’ve encountered.
The second section shifts focus to Chia’s best friend, Zikora, a highly strung lawyer and practising Catholic who moved from Nigeria to Washington and has been dreaming of marriage and motherhood.
By 31 she feels like a victim of “biology’s hysterical constraints” — especially when Kwame, the most attentive boyfriend she has had, abruptly flees on hearing she is pregnant, leaving her to deal with the consequences alone.
During childbirth the medics’ conversation with Zikora’s cold, stoical mother makes her feel like “a threadbare wrung-out rag, a thing without feeling, easy to ignore and discard”.
The book becomes more sombre as we approach the story of Chia’s housekeeper, Kadiatou, a quietly dignified single mother from Guinea, who “dreamed only of achievable things”. Kadi has lost her sister to female genital mutilation, been abandoned by her first love, watched her first child die and suffered sexual assault — all before she sets foot in America, where she is ambushed by more horrors.
In her part-time job as a hotel cleaner, Kadi is raped by a French economist who is running for president of France. After the man violently forces her to have oral sex, Kadi feels “her mouth was full of worms … she was spitting and spitting.
She was spitting on the opulent floor that was her job to clean, but she could not help herself.” I’ve read a number of powerful scenes of sexual assault in fiction but none, until now, that have made me cry tears of rage.
The story is inspired by the allegations of Nafissatou Diallo, the hotel maid from Guinea who said in 2011 that Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the former IMF chief, had attempted to rape her.
The case collapsed after Diallo was accused of lying in court about something in her past. Adichie explains in her author’s note that she wanted to “‘write’ a wrong” by creating a fictional version of Diallo as “a gesture of returned dignity”.
The result is a deeply poignant description of the aftermath, full of human details. When the sexual health nurse arrives to take Kadi’s hotel uniform it feels “like a loss, a failure” to this hard-working woman. She fears she has “caused too much trouble”.
But it’s no less complicated in Nigeria, where Chia’s self-possessed cousin Omelogor has flourished as a banker in Abuja, laundering money for corrupt politicians.
Omelogor flees “the putrid centre of Nigerian finance”, seeking “restoration” at an American graduate school, where she hopes to write a PhD about pornography.
But America makes her furious, especially the “pious class” of liberals she encounters in academia — one of whom accuses her of Islamophobia when she tells the story of how her uncle was murdered by militants.
Omelogor is a fascinating character, full of contradictions. She’s at once monstrously arrogant and entitled, embedding herself within a privileged social set who all bitch about their domestic help.
But she is meanwhile secretly redistributing the money she has laundered to poor women hoping to start small businesses, via a fund she names “Robyn Hood”.
Dream Count is a big, noisy novel that covers a lot of issues, from cancel culture in US universities to intra-black tensions between Africans and African-Americans.
It’s also extremely funny, especially in the Chia and Omelogor sections, both narrated with delicious irony in the first person (Zikora and Kadi’s stories are more straightforward third-person narratives).
And yet it’s propelled by a deep anger about the state of the world for women. Indeed, the novel seems to be addressing the question that Adichie posed in a 2021 podcast: “Why do women have such a f***ing hard time?”
According to Zikora’s proud mother, it’s because pain belongs to the female sex. “Bear it,” she tells her daughter in childbirth. “That is what it means to be a woman.”
At times, Dream Count reads like a feminist War and Peace. It is an account of the war waged against women — by society, yes, but also by their own bodies.
As Adichie said in her 2012 talk: “Women have turned pretence into an art form”. It can be heavy going, but it is a novel that men should read for precisely the reason that Omelogor points out: “Loving women doesn’t mean knowing women.”
Suffused with truth, wit and compassion, this is a magnificent novel that understands the messiness of human motivation and is courageous enough to ask difficult questions. It made me feel frustrated about the world but very good about the state of fiction.
Dream Count by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (4th Estate £20 pp416). To order a copy go to timesbookshop.co.uk. Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members.
Culled from The Sunday Times
