In 2013, the publication of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah made the Nigerian author something of a household name. Reviews were positive, and the novel won the National Book Critics Circle award. Adichie’s profile increased further when Beyoncé used a sample from the author’s TED Talk, “We Should All Be Feminists,” on the track “Flawless.” Americanah spent seventy-eight weeks on the paperback bestseller list.
Today, Americanah reads as an artifact of the Obama era. The book is about Ifemelu, a Nigerian immigrant to America, who writes a popular blog about race in America with exactly the kind of Race 101 thinking we found impressive in 2013:
Dear American Non-Black, if an American Black person is telling you about an experience about being black, please do not eagerly bring up examples from your own life. Don’t say “It’s just like when I …” You have suffered. Everyone in the world has suffered. But you have not suffered precisely because you are an American Black. Don’t be quick to find alternative explanations for what happened. Don’t say “Oh, it’s not really race, it’s class. Oh, it’s not race, it’s gender. Oh, it’s not race, it’s the cookie monster.” You see, American Blacks actually don’t WANT it to be race. They would rather not have racist shit happen …
But Americanah was good precisely because Ifemelu is so complex: she believes in the truth of what she’s saying, but she also understands, on some intuitive level, that if she’s going to keep critiquing racism in America, then she needs to commit to life in America. And Ifemelu decides she’d rather not: she shuts down her blog and returns to Nigeria. Americanah, which was embraced by America, is ultimately a rejection of the possibility of living a dignified life as a Black person in America.
However, Adichie warns against the dangers of a single story. “[W]hen we realize that there is never a single story about any place,” she said in a 2009 speech, “we regain a kind of paradise.”
That’s why I was curious about her latest novel—her first in ten years and her first since Americanah. I wondered if Dream Count, which is being published today, would be an opportunity to tell some different stories about what it means to be Black or African in America, and whether Adichie, or her characters, would discover any kind of paradise. What I found instead was a novel that seems to be retracing well-trodden ground, and a writer who seems stuck in a country she neither knows nor cares for.
Dream Count begins with the reflections of Chiamaka, a wealthy Nigerian travel writer living in suburban Maryland. It is the midst of the pandemic, and Chiamaka is thinking about the men she has loved:
I have always longed to be known, truly known, by another human being. Sometimes we live for years with yearnings that we cannot name. Until a crack appears in the sky and widens and reveals us to ourselves, as the pandemic did, because it was during lockdown that I began to sift through my life and give names to things long unnamed.
While Adichie’s novels all tend to have political themes, her previous two, Americanah and Half of a Yellow Sun, are largely driven by romantic attachments. Americanah features a pair of star-crossed lovers, Ifemelu and Obinze, separated by circumstance. That novel was powered by simple suspense: what will happen when these two finally reunite? And Half of a Yellow Sun is similarly about two sisters, Olanna and Kainene, who are in relationships with two men, Odenigbo and Richard. It is these relationships that sustain and inspire these women.
In Dream Count, however, Adichie leaves cupid’s arrow in its quiver: the four major sections of Dream Count do not feature a single protagonist fulfilled by love. To the extent that these women find meaning in their lives, it’ll need to come from elsewhere. Chiamaka ruminates upon the Nigerian-American boyfriend whom she left because she didn’t want a settled, stable domestic life. Her friend Zikora gives birth while yearning after Kwame, the boyfriend who left her when he discovered she was pregnant. Chiamaka’s part-time housekeeper, Kadiatou, is raped by a VIP at the hotel where she works; this section of the novel is explicitly modeled, as per the author’s note, after the story of Dominique Strauss-Khan’s alleged sexual assault against Nafissatou Diallo. And, finally, Chiamaka’s cousin Omelogor made a fortune by facilitating corrupt financial transactions in Nigeria. After a miserable stint at an American graduate program, Omelogor is back in Abuja, wondering whether or not to adopt a child.
These characters are organized in two pairs: Chiamaka and Omelogor are both writers. They both have strings of short-term relationships. They both seem to be more committed to work, friends, and family than to love. In contrast, Zikora and Kadiatou are both religious. Zikora is a Catholic, Kadiatou is Muslim. They adhere to the religions in which they were raised. And they put their faith in traditional things. First, in marriage; when that fails them, they put their faith into their children.
Dream Count, which is the story of four women, does not feature a single protagonist fulfilled by love.
Chiamaka’s story is somewhat dull. The scenes are well-observed, but little is at stake. She’d like to be with a man, but no non-Nigerian can ever really know her, and the one Igbo man she dates is also unable to understand her intellectual, feminist, and self-determined side.
Zikora, too, lacks agency. She would love to marry her boyfriend, Kwame, but she realizes that when she got pregnant, it was perhaps without his understanding:
…he surely understood birth control. Or did he not? Could it be that Kwame was fuzzy, that when she had said, “I’m stopping the pill,” and he had said, “Okay, babe,” they had not shared the same understanding of what that exchange meant?…Maybe she should have been clearer, maybe they should have talked plainly, as they talked about so much. Why hadn’t she been clearer? Did she choose to assume he understood, because she didn’t want to give him the chance to say he didn’t want a child?
This passage is Adichie at her best, portraying the way human beings can lie to themselves and contain contradictions. But it’s in Kadiatou’s and Omelogor’s sections that this complexity comes out more deeply. Both women are rich and compelling in ways that may discomfit some American readers. Kadiatou’s early life, in a village in Guinea, is not too unpleasant—even her female genital mutilation (preparatory to her marriage) doesn’t cause her undue distress. It’s really her husband’s alcoholism that drives her to despair: as a Muslim, Kadiatou is appalled that her husband drinks and certain that his drinking will bring a curse on their family.
Once in America, Kadiatou sets herself to the task of creating a good life for herself. When she’s raped in the hotel where she works, her main concern is that she not lose her job. She’s used to rape: she was raped once before, in Guinea, by her boss at a restaurant. Her manager at the hotel and, later, her boyfriend and relatives push her to file a police report against the hotel guest, but when the case is finally dropped, her main reaction is relief.
The same complexity runs through the final section of the book, which tells the story of Omelogor. From an early age, Omelogor wants to be rich. So she goes into finance, and helps her boss develop shady financial products to allow politicians to hide their stolen millions. It’s through her that we glimpse the high life in Abuja, and that we meet the book’s most memorable character, Hauwa, her best friend. Hauwa is a Muslim woman who maintains a facade of stern rectitude around men but also uses recreational drugs and organizes all-woman parties where she and her friends engage in same-sex erotic play.
In some ways, Omelogor resembles a typical Adichie hero: she eventually goes to grad school, engages in angry debates with her fellow grad students, and starts writing a blog, For Men Only, that attempts to take men’s concerns seriously. In other ways, she’s very different: She has no desire for a long-term relationship, choosing instead to engage in a string of brief affairs that always end when her ardor suddenly cools.
As in Americanah, meaning or fulfillment will not be found in the American dream, either. Indeed, the best parts of Dream Count are those that take place outside America. This was also true with Americanah, which came alive in the sections featuring Ifemelu’s childhood in Nigeria, or Obinze’s struggles in London and eventual success back home in Nigeria, or, especially, after Ifemelu repatriates and settles in Lagos.
In the American sections of her work, however, the characters are flattened, as Adichie relies on the tropes of the immigrant novel: no matter how successful you become in America, it never feels like home, and there’s always a warmth and vitality and sense of connectedness “back home” that you’ll miss. This results in a kind of fundamentally unresolvable anger toward America.
As Ifemelu puts it in Americanah:
I like America. It’s really the only place else where I could live apart from here. But one day a bunch of Blaine’s friends and I were talking about kids and I realized that if I ever have children, I don’t want them to have American childhoods. I don’t want them to say “Hi” to adults, I want them to say “Good morning” and “Good afternoon.” I don’t want them to mumble “Good” when somebody says “How are you?” to them. Or to raise five fingers when asked how old they are…. I don’t want a child who feeds on praise and expects a star for effort and talks back to adults in the name of self-expression. Is that terribly conservative? Blaine’s friends said it was and for them, “conservative” is the worst insult you can get.
Repatriation is one possible solution to the loss engendered by immigration, and it’s one Adichie herself tried: at one point she attempted to spend half the year in Nigeria. But since having children, she’s settled, more or less permanently, in Maryland, where her physician husband has a practice. This is a typical immigrant conundrum.
And it’s a conundrum that, in Dream Count, appears to have left Adichie stuck in place, repeating many of the same beats as Americanah and re-litigating the same critiques of American liberals. In grad school, Omelogor is challenged by grad students who consider banking to be inherently corrupt, and she self-righteously answers, “Where do you put your money?” But the book never addresses the deeper point, which is that within the world of this story, these kids are right; Omelogor’s own banking career consisted of nothing more than helping corrupt officials engage in money-laundering and tax evasion. If there is a case to be made for banking, this book doesn’t make it, and while Omelogor feels shame over her actions, the moment anyone else implies that perhaps she’s done wrong, they’re accused of being shallow and lacking nuance.
In Dream Count, Adichie tends to stack the deck in her characters’ favor.
As Adichie retreads earlier territory, she does not do so with greater empathy or nuance, just more ire. While nobody in Dream Count “cancels” anyone else, this book is full of the brittleness and black-and-white thinking that defined cancel culture. Both Chiamaka and Omelogor love to castigate Americans for their closed-mindedness and lack of nuance. For instance, upon meeting Darnell’s friends, Chiamaka notes, “Their conversations were always greased with complaints; everything was ‘problematic,’ even the things of which they approved.” Similarly, on first meeting Darnell, Omelogor critiques his simplistic understanding of slavery as something that only harmed Black Americans. She says, “[Y]ou forget that Africans were also victims. You think the people sold into slavery weren’t missed and mourned?”
But there is really no substantial difference between Chiamaka and Omelogor and Darnell and the grad students. The people Chiamaka and Omelogor despise are exactly the same as themselves, and what’s being enacted on the page is the same kind of purity culture that Adichie claims to hate. Americans who express themselves slightly differently from Chiamaka or Omelogor are held up for contempt and ridicule.
If this book were just about some self-important, brittle people who critique others but can’t bear to be criticized themselves, that could be compelling, and akin to Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, where for every Naphta there is a Settembrini to provide the counterpoint, and where both characters talk such a mix of sense and nonsense that it’s impossible to take either one completely seriously.
But in Dream Count, Adichie tends to stack the deck in her characters’ favor. Whenever Chiamaka or Omelogor are criticized, it’s always by some bitter loser, whether it’s Darnell, or his pseudo-intellectual friends, or the vapid grad students in Omelogor’s master’s program. It’s never by anyone the reader is forced to take seriously.
For instance, Darnell and Chiamaka break up because she orders a mimosa at a fancy restaurant in France—an act that he considers uncultured, especially in front of his new French acquaintances.
“You ordered a mimosa at the Hotel Montalembert? Like it’s your favorite chain brunch spot in D.C.?”
“What’s wrong with that?”
“That’s some ugly American shit right there. It’s not like you haven’t traveled the world.”
A short while later, she replies:
“I like mimosas. I don’t have to perform whatever you think Paris is supposed to be, just because you want to impress some Frenchwoman.”
“Okay, that’s patronizing classist shit.”
“How?” For a moment, I wondered if I was wrong, but didn’t know how I was wrong. He made me doubt my right to anger. “How?”
He walks away, ending the conversation, and they break up after the trip ends. It’s an entertaining scene, because the irony is that Darnell is insecure over his relative lack of travel experience, so he’s concocted this flat-footed way of putting Chiamaka in her place. But it’s also emblematic of the arguments in this book: whenever one of Adichie’s protagonists engages in an argument, her opponents are left flummoxed and tongue-tied.
There is much that is excellent in Adichie’s work, and at her best, she really does read like a modern-day Balzac, laying bare the entirety of the human heart, with neither pity nor judgement. But whenever she writes about America, that magisterial quality abandons her. The core issue faced by Chiamaka and Omelogor is their disappointment with life in America, and their inability to really believe in anything resembling the American dream, but this disappointment tends to be obscured by a mass of petty arguments that suggest that if liberals in America were to express themselves slightly differently, then the pain of dislocation would suddenly fall away.
In this, perhaps Kadiatou’s story shows a way forward. The most arresting image of the novel comes at the end, in her reaction to news that the prosecutors won’t pursue charges against the VIP. The pursuit of justice against her oppressor, the novel suggests, might ultimately have imprisoned and flattened Kadiatou, and now, with that pursuit abandoned, she can finally be free.