Writer, lawyer, banker, cleaner

Chiamaka, a middle-aged Nigerian writer living in Maryland, is cooped up at home during the Covid lockdown, with only her memories for company. She looks back over her hapless love life, starting with her university boyfriend, an emotionally withholding know-it-all called Darnell. He “loved Paris because of James Baldwin; Heaven forbid he should love it for any of the conventional reasons”; they broke up after she embarrassed him by ordering a mimosa at the Montalembert hotel. Chuka was decent and dependable, but he didn’t set her heart aflutter (“I did not want what I wanted to want”). Several others also fell short; the one guy who made the grade turned out to be married, and disinclined to leave his wife. Chiamaka calls this roster of exes her “dream count” – a sentimental variation on the crude term “body count” – and wallows in self-pity. She is rich, beautiful and educated – how did it come to this?

Dream Count, the fourth novel by the Nigerian-born author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, comprises four loosely interconnected narratives telling the stories of four women: Chiamaka; her best friend, Zikora, a lawyer; her go-getting banker cousin Omelogor; and her Guinean housekeeper, Kadiatou. Terrible men are a recurring theme, and the tales of romantic woe are enjoyably salty. Zikora’s boyfriend, Kwame, likes to spend time in her flat because it has bigger windows than his, and “all that natural light made his video games look better on the screen”. His agreeable manners and “boyish nice-guy voice” belie a cowardly inadequacy: he does a runner after getting Zikora pregnant, and she reflects bitterly on “that vile scam of a man’s public goodness”.

Omelogor is an inveterate singleton whose romantic entanglements rarely last longer than a fortnight. (“It is a full life, and a life I own … To be alone is not always to be lonely.”) Disillusioned with her job at a corrupt Nigerian investment bank, she enrols as a postgraduate student in the cultural studies department of an American university. Shortly before quitting the bank, she goes rogue and illicitly funnels funds to deserving small businesswomen in rural Nigeria. She waxes sentimental about the innate savvy of Igbo people: “These village- raised women who barely finished primary school, querulous and wise and sharp-tongued; they guarded their money and spent with good sense, and never missed a thing”.

The prevailing timbre is of wistful regret. Adichie sometimes uses ponderous metaphors to convey emotional pain or dread: Zikora has to “bear the beast of her loneliness”, then finds herself “jousting with the monster of shame”; grumblings of discontent at Omelogor’s workplace are as “nebulous as clouds”. The storytelling feels more assured in the passages of wry social observation, often involving the culture clash between American lassitude and the intense seriousness of the aspirational African diaspora, as when Chiamaka’s mother bemoans the unloveliness of American colloquialisms – “How can you be grabbing your lunch?” – or Omelogor ruminates on the “infantile heart” of US mass entertainment.

The writer, lawyer and banker are drawn from a world familiar to Adichie, and she is more or less in her element with these characters. But the housekeeper, Kadiatou, is a condescending cutout, her existence defined largely by a series of catastrophes so unremittingly bleak that they border on the absurd. Her father, a miner, is killed in a rock slide. Her sister dies from complications following an operation for cancer. She marries an alcoholic, suffers a miscarriage, then gets pregnant again, only for the child to die in infancy. Her husband dies. She is raped by an employer and then, after claiming asylum in the US, is sexually assaulted by a high-status guest at the New York hotel where she works as a cleaner; the perpetrator is charged, but the prosecution collapses when the defence dredges up concerns around the veracity of Kadiatou’s asylum application. (This story line, the author explains in her postscript, was inspired by the case of Nafissatou Diallo, whose case against Dominique Strauss-Kahn in 2011 for alleged assault was similarly dismissed.)

Presumably the author felt obligated to remind readers about what real hardship looks like, by way of counterpoint to the relatively privileged lives of the other three protagonists. However, by heaping such a catalogue of miseries on a single character, she lapses into poverty porn: the only working-class member of her quartet reads less like a human being than a case study, as if an NGO report had been fed through artificial intelligence.

An almost compulsive sociological completism weighs down Dream Count as Adichie strains to ensure that every plot point speaks to the cultural zeitgeist. A younger female character seems to have been introduced primarily so she can develop body-image issues as a result of consuming dubious material on Instagram, prompting Omelogor to lament that the young “know irony and hyperbole and sass, but self-love is strange to them”. Omelogor is concerned about how online pornography is reshaping male sexual behaviour, and writes an anonymous blog in order to help men better understand what women want. Other culturally contentious practices explored include female genital mutilation, skin-bleaching and butt lifts.

Adichie has pursued a prominent sideline in social activism ever since she came to attention for her debut, Purple Hibiscus was longlisted for the Booker prize in 2004, when she was just twenty-seven. Her two TED Talks on feminism and cultural authenticity have clocked up a combined 44 million views; in the years since her last novel, Americanah (2013), she has published a bestselling nonfiction book, We Should All Be Feminists (2014), and a collection of short stories, Dear Ijeawele (2017), subtitled A feminist manifesto in fifteen suggestions. Dream Count is very much a continuation of this work.

It is perhaps surprising, then, that the novel features several satirical digs at bien pensant liberals in the worlds of publishing and academia. Chiamaka recalls an awkward phone call with an editor at a big publishing house concerning her proposal for a whimsical travel memoir. The editor is keen to work with her, but feels that the memoir idea lacks “relevance” and suggests that Chiamaka write instead about sexual violence in Africa – “a book on Congo and the struggles of the people there would really resonate right now … Somalia or Sudan could work too”. “As soon as she said ‘struggles’, the word lengthened piously, enunciated earnestly, I knew she saw me as an interpreter of struggles.”

Omelogor feels similarly uncomfortable in the leftie postgrad milieu, where she encounters a feminist scholar who “didn’t like women. She liked only the idea of women”, and a female student with “the pinched, humorless face of a person who thrived on grievances”. After sharing the story of her uncle’s murder at the hands of Muslim extremists in Nigeria, she is scolded for encouraging Islamophobia. She concludes: “They don’t know how to love, these pious people … Even the way they help each other is so cheerless and earnest”.

The suggestion is that the uninterrogated prejudices of these groups are of a piece with the broader suite of social problems discussed in the novel. And perhaps they are. By centring her protagonists’ personal lives, Adichie has sought to push back against a publishing culture that too often reduces the subjectivity of Black and ethnic-minority characters to the narrow confines of political struggle. Yet she contrives, time and again, to fall back on sociological handwringing.

While Dream Count’s fragmentary formal structure and unsatisfying plot arc represent something of a commercial risk (like many a pandemic novel, it ultimately goes nowhere), the author’s regurgitation of topical talking points has already proven to be catnip to the cultural commentariat, producing a powerful feedback loop of editorializing solemnity. At a time when the boundary between theme-heavy “book club” fiction and what passes for serious literature seems to be more porous than ever, it would be no great surprise if this novel were to end up on the Booker longlist – not in spite of its flaws, but because of them.

Houman Barekat is co-editor, with Robert Barry and David Winters, of The Digital Critic: Literary culture online, 2017

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