Chimamanda Adichie’s Fiction Has Shed Its Optimism

On the same day that the Access Hollywood tape landed, a month before Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton at the ballot box, the Nigerian American writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie drew a surprising gender-related battle line of her own. In an October 2016 interview, she expressed mild displeasure that on Beyoncé’s track “Flawless,” the pop star had sampled (with permission) from Adichie’s by-then-famous 2013 TED Talk, “We Should All Be Feminists.” “Her type of feminism is not mine,” she observed, politely calling Beyoncé out for giving “quite a lot of space to the necessity of men.” Hastening to say that she thinks “men are lovely,” Adichie envisioned a recalibration: “We women should spend about 20 percent of our time on men … but otherwise we should also be talking about our own stuff.”

Dream Count, her fourth novel, is about how difficult this task actually is. Adichie is interested in women who, in certain ways, shrug off the patriarchal straitjacket of decades past, yet who also can’t quite manage to focus on their “own stuff,” letting men monopolize more than their allotted 20 percent. This is provocative cultural terrain—rife with historical and social and psychological (and biological) tensions—and the sort of ground that Adichie has nimbly traversed in her fiction before. In Dream Count’s predecessor, Americanah, she casts a satiric eye on race in America. Her well-heeled Nigerian protagonist Ifemelu navigates postcollege life—and sex and romance—in the United States, recording her reflections in a blog titled Raceteenth or Various Observations About American Blacks (Those Formerly Known as Negroes) by a Non-American Black. Like her creator, Ifemelu has an outsider’s knack for spotlighting the cruelties, vacuous niceties, and comic absurdities of race relations in a country caught between the past evils of slavery and Jim Crow, and the aspirational multiculturalism of a semi-enlightened 21st century.

But Adichie also provided Ifemelu a comparatively sanguine view of relations between the sexes. And it is precisely this optimism that has been scrubbed, more than a decade later, from Dream Count, an unusually dispiriting novel. Americanah’s incisive critique of race was set within a rom-com arc: Ifemelu ends up back home and in the arms of her high-school-and-college boyfriend, Obinze, whose own story of a brutal immigrant sojourn in Britain shares center stage in the novel. This time, Adichie’s protagonists are all women: three globally mobile Nigerians from the kind of upper-class backgrounds familiar from her earlier fiction, and one Guinean immigrant who has taken refuge in America, following her romantic partner.

Each is accorded her own section of Dream Count, yet their stories intersect and share a basic trajectory and bleak tone: Men enter their lives like meteors entering the atmosphere, leaving a trail of heat and light but always burning out. Whose fault this is—the women’s, the men’s—is for the most part unclear. Adichie’s protagonists are independent and deeply ambivalent, not so much aloof as detached, both from their love interests and from their own desires and aspirations. In a novel stuffed with reminiscences of past relationships, regret is startlingly absent. If Adichie the feminist-manifesto writer is comfortable dispensing advice in the form of shoulds and should nots, Adichie the novelist seems allergic to such judgments.

Dream Count unfolds during the peak of the COVID era, yet reaches back to a time before Zoom screens and hoarded toilet paper. Chiamaka, a struggling travel writer quarantined in a suburban Maryland house purchased for her by her father, is the hub of the group, and her first-person narration opens and closes the novel. At 44, she’s been based in the U.S. for years but has resisted putting down roots, and she spends much of the novel reflecting on her history with men. She calls her self-imposed audit her “dream count,” which she uses as a softer-edged synonym for “body count.” This effort to reckon with her flings and love affairs speaks to the novel’s broader project: a bricolage of confusion, set against a backdrop of 21st-century feminism, with its unsatisfying forms of liberation, and traditionalist African patriarchy, with its equally unsatisfying constraints and at-times-violent indignities.

[Chimamanda Adichie: How I became Black in America]

Adichie quite deliberately presents us with protagonists who have trouble sticking to that one-fifth time limit of thinking about men. Her quartet of characters is a lineup of familiar female archetypes. Chia is a romantic intent on true love, an adventurer forever seeking a soulmate. Her best friend, Zikora, is a striver eager to have it all—a lucrative legal career and a husband and children. Omelogor is Chia’s cousin, recently back home after a leave from her Nigerian finance job to study pornography in American graduate school; she’s an acerbic pragmatist who avoids serious relationships. And Kadiatou, Chia’s hired help, has been lured from Guinea by dreams and is shocked by permissive American mores. Motherhood, real and hypothetical, is front of mind for all, and expectations veer off course for each of them.

In Omelogor, Adichie seems to be reaching for another satirical guide on the model of Ifemelu, Americanah’s race-blogger protagonist: a participant observer of fraying gender dynamics, emotionally preoccupied with the opposite sex while also bemusedly untethered. For several years, Omelogor has been running a popular website, For Men Only, which takes off during the pandemic. There she dispenses anonymous but clearly female counsel about gender, sex, and romance, having decided that men need more than the pornographic tutelage they’re steeped in. She signs her missives with a lightly pandering flourish: “Remember, I’m on your side, dear men.”

But Omelogor is angry too (sometimes a symptom of depression, Chia notes). She’s well aware that despite the persona she creates for her blog, she is no expert on serious relationships, and she suspects that she may be too cynical and disillusioned to be on anyone’s side in the gender war, including her own. She cops to having returned from her American sojourn with “a jaundiced spirit and a mood like midnight.” Instead of enjoying the restorative break she’d hoped for (money laundering loomed large in her African banking work), she felt lonely and alienated, not least by “perfect righteous American liberals,” insistent that “you board their ideological train.”

Omelogor, who bridles at pigeonholing and being pigeonholed, is a study in contradictions. Online, she urges her readers to shower their partners with verbal affection—because “love needs tending”—while out in the world, she breaks off relationships at the first sign of a possible “emotion happening,” her term for falling in love. Dream Count is peppered with excerpts of For Men Only’s invariably banal advice (there are many ways to be a man, etc.), blog entries so anemic that you’re left wondering whether that’s the point: Nobody’s heart is really in communicating. Omelogor herself is skeptical that she can commit to truly opening up to others, in either her public or private life. When she was young, she chose aloofness because she “wanted to be free.” Now her general self-diagnosis is “disappointed disenchantment, or disenchanted disappointment.”

That spirit pervades the COVID-haunted novel, as Adichie undercuts conventional assumptions about gender roles and attitudes. Tucked into Chia’s romantic quest for a “merging of souls” is a self-reliant ruthlessness more often associated with the male script. “I did want a husband and child, but not under any circumstances,” she reflects early on. “I didn’t want to be single, but being single was not intolerable.” In the relationship that stands out most in her memory—with a kindhearted Nigerian named Chuka, eager to marry and have kids, and great in bed—he’s the one left protesting that “I told you my intentions from day one.” She cannot come up with a reason for torpedoing it that will satisfy either him or herself, and instead admits simply: “I did not want what I wanted to want.”

[Read: America’s blindness to the racism all around us]

Adichie counterposes a more recognizable script for Zikora, who for all her confidence at work lacks Chia and Omelogor’s bold assurance with men. She’s endured a few insufferable boyfriends—classic narcissists—when she finds Kwame, a fellow lawyer with a background very different from hers: Reared in northern Virginia, he’s been pushed hard by his Ghanaian father and African American mother, “his dreams already dreamed for him.” But she’s thrilled to discover what feels like true intimacy: “So this was happiness, to live in the first person plural.” When he abruptly disappears at the news that she’s pregnant, she is stunned and can’t stop wondering how she could have made herself any clearer.

In some sense, Dream Count is a novel about inscrutable intentions: our own and those of other people. Why does Chia leave Chuka? Why does Omelogor cut and run at the first tremor of an “emotion happening”? Why does Zikora’s seemingly forthright boyfriend abandon her? Even as Adichie scatters hints (was Kwame more of a cowed son than Zikora grasped?), she is also explicit, in a closing “author’s note,” that sometimes the goal of a successful novel is to leave its tangles tangled. “To attempt to fictionally humanize a person,” she writes, means confronting

how we let ourselves and others down, how we emerge or don’t from our failings, how we are petty, how we try to overcome and strive to improve, how we seethe in our self-pity, how we fail, how we hold on tenaciously to hope.

Adichie, with her focus squarely on women, doesn’t hold back in Dream Count from revealing how her protagonists, in their romantic relationships, can be as deluded about themselves and their desires as they are about men and theirs. “Each day with Chuka, I encountered his otherness,” Chia reflects in a patronizing tone as she cites examples of his shirt-tucked-in, methodical ways: “sturdy, reassuring, uncreative.” However, Adichie also resists turning these uncoupled couplings into cautionary tales: Years later, Chia feels a belated tug of uncertainty about her decision to leave Chuka, but the reader is given no clear sense that she made the wrong choice, only that she made a sad one.

[Chimamanda Adichie: Nigeria’s hollow democracy]

Nor do conflicting African and American values get resolved, melded into a best-of-both-worlds fusion of beliefs. Zikora, overwhelmed with shame at being a single mother, is jolted into a new perspective on her own mother, who comes to help with her baby: She learns that a long-ago family rupture when her father took a second wife—an Igbo tradition when the first hasn’t produced a male heir—is more complicated than she had guessed. Kadiatou is a victim of female genital mutilation, and yet she’s taken aback when her Guinean boyfriend describes the practice as “barbaric.” She initially balks at his suggestion that she seek asylum on the pretext of sparing her own daughter from the cutting.

Asylum is not what Kadiatou, who is the most burdened of the four yet who also unexpectedly emerges feeling the most liberated, finds in America. She gets caught up in a justice system clearly not designed to serve people like her after she is assaulted by a rich and powerful man in the hotel where she has found work as a maid. The scene is harrowing but short, the procedural aftermath briefly hope-instilling. The police are called, the evidence gathered, the perpetrator identified. And then Kadiatou’s ordeal goes on and on: grueling interrogations that make her feel guilty and trip her up, while the monstrous VIP uses his fame and fortune to delay and delay.

The author’s note reveals that Kadiatou’s story is based on the real-life case of Nafissatou Diallo, a Guinean immigrant and hotel maid who accused the head of the International Monetary Fund of assault in 2011. The case, Adichie reminds readers, was dismissed—not because prosecutors had proved the accused was innocent, but because the defendant’s lawyers felt that she had lied too much about her past for a jury to trust her. In the novel, Adichie vividly imagines the lawyerly grilling, the media hounding, the experience of being ambushed and isolated. And then, taking artistic license, she dispenses a fate that departs from Diallo’s; Kadiatou is granted a resolution that brings her huge relief, even if it undercuts the convictions of her far wealthier Nigerian friends.

In We Should All Be Feminists, the book that grew out of the TED Talk, Adichie observed that women are habituated to give up “a job, a career goal, a dream”; ultimately, as she put it, “compromise is what a woman is more likely to do.” In the end, none of Dream Count’s protagonists compromises, yet Adichie seems uninterested in turning this refusal into a feminist triumph. Their dreams don’t pan out. Her characters experience no cathartic epiphany that they are better off without men after all. Nor do they truly second-guess their life choices: We get no sense that they would be better off with men either.

We aren’t treated to a valorization of the nuclear family, or an African spin on resurgent tradwifery, or a paeon to the miracles of motherhood. “What am I supposed to do with him?” Zikora wonders about her baby. “There would be more days and weeks of this, not knowing what to do with a squalling person whose needs she feared she could never know.” Omelogor doesn’t hesitate to take a closing swipe at the special proclivity to pontificate that she encountered everywhere in the U.S.: “They want your life to match their soft half-baked theories,” she once ranted in a For Men Only entry that she deleted before posting but shares with us. She claims to detest the “provincial certainty” of Americans who are overconfident in their quick cultural judgments, yet Dream Count makes clear that the cosmopolitan uncertainty of the wealthy African abroad is not much better.