Had it become possible to forget that Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is a very good novelist? More than 10 years have passed since her last novel, Americanah, and in that time she’s become a bona fide star (name another author who would be asked to advertise makeup or have their writing sampled by Beyoncé), a public figure whose influence extends beyond readers of her breakout novel, the Orange prize-winning Nigeria-Biafra war epic Half of a Yellow Sun (2006).
Like Americanah and her story collection The Thing Around Your Neck, Adichie’s new novel, Dream Count – a big book, richly marbled with criss-crossing storylines, dramatic but not plotty – is poised between Nigeria and the US. Where those earlier books were often concerned with eyeing American mores from immigrant vantage points, this one is more a bumper compilation of middle-aged life experience, built around the friendship of three Nigerian women whose lives haven’t panned out as imagined with respect to marriage and motherhood – a state of affairs to which the book delivers a full-throated “so what?” while refusing to sideline any potential for heartache and regret.
But if Chiamaka, Zikora and Omelogor aren’t each paired up as their Igbo families expected, the problem is men: the slightly hard-to-parse title, with its faint echo of “body count”, portends a patient tallying of hopes repeatedly dashed by innumerable inadequates. We’re in Washington DC in early 2020 when the novel kicks off. There’s talk amid ominous news from Wuhan that “human-to-human transmission” isn’t possible, and someone’s using the end of a teaspoon to key in their pin at the ATM, but while Adichie deftly captures the prevailing atmosphere of pre-lockdown uncertainty, the pandemic is only a backdrop for reminiscence as the first of the novel’s four main characters, 44-year-old travel writer Chiamaka, starts Googling old boyfriends, setting the stage for a totting-up of shitty guys, or “thieves of time”, per her best friend, Zikora.
Chiamaka, the youngest child and only daughter of a wealthy Nigerian businessman (“Jesus fucking Christ. Is that actually his net worth?” someone asks, searching his name), recounts half a dozen ill-chosen affairs, from a two-timing academic who answers her question about where they stand by telling her that’s “a hackneyed question lifted from the contemporary morass that is pop culture”, to a secretly married Englishman met online in London. Whatever the relationship, Chiamaka ends up alone, unless you count the sisterhood, continued in lockdown over Zoom, of Zikora, a lawyer, and Chiamaka’s enjoyably sharp-tongued cousin, Omelogor, a double-dealing banker in Abuja. There’s also Chimaka’s Guinean housekeeper, Kadiatou, who came to the US after the death of her father in a mining accident, and whose perspective also gets equivalent airtime at the book’s halfway point.
