All the Lonely People
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s first novel in over a decade asks, ‘Only connect? How?’
Dream Count
by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Knopf, 416 pp., $32
IT HAS BEEN TWELVE YEARS SINCE Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie published her last novel, the much-acclaimed Americanah. She’s not exactly been idle during the interim. Americanah made her a literary celebrity, and her celebrity made her a cultural power station: She published three essays as standalone books, released a children’s book, and got to hear her own voice on a Beyoncé song thanks to the singer’s decision to sample one of her TED Talks. Adichie also found herself at the center of two different controversies during this period—the first concerning comments she made about trans women, the second regarding a feud between her and a former student. Of course, that covers only what happened during her nine-to-five; since Americanah’s release, she has also welcomed three children into the world. Perhaps for some, there are decades in which centuries happen.
Now, after a period in which she was “almost existentially frightened that [she] wouldn’t write again,” Adichie is back with her fourth novel, Dream Count. The book tells the stories of four African women living or spending a lot of time in America. It is a book about many things: about women’s dreams; about COVID lockdowns; about the travails of dating men in the twenty-first century; about writing; about sexual assault; about the biological realities of reproduction and women’s health and how little men really know about these things; about the hypocrisies of privileged American academics.
But its deepest recurring question is one that I imagine has a special resonance for a figure as well known—and therefore, necessarily, as widely misunderstood—as Adichie: whether it is possible to ever really know or be known by another person.
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. I vowed at first to make the most of this collective sequestering: if I had no choice but to stay indoors, then I would oil my thinning edges every day, drink eight tall glasses of water, jog on the treadmill, sleep long, luxurious hours, and pat rich serums on my skin. I would write new travel pieces from old unused notes, and if lockdown lasted long enough, I might finally have the heft I needed for a book. But only days in, and I was spiraling inside a bottomless well.
THESE ARE THE WORDS OF Chiamaka, who narrates the first and last of the book’s five sections. She is a Nigerian travel writer based in Maryland who ends up coping with the isolation of the COVID lockdowns by ruminating about the various men she has dated and the different lives she both lived and could have lived with them had any of those relationships continued.
Chiamaka then connects us to the other three characters: Zikora, a successful Nigerian-American lawyer, is Chiamaka’s best friend; Kadiatou, a Guinean asylee, is a hotel maid who also works as Chiamaka’s housekeeper; and Omelogor, Chiamaka’s cousin, is a wealthy banker in Nigeria who, unhappy with her life in the always corrupt and shady financial sector, comes to America to get a master’s degree in cultural studies with a special focus on pornography.
Zikora’s section comes after Chiamaka’s; it is the shortest and probably the weakest of the four. It comprises an accounting of the various men Zikora has dated, but its central incident is Zikora giving birth in an American hospital, all while the baby’s father is nowhere to be found. She is left with her overbearing mother, who reacts to Zikora’s cries of agony with whispered admonitions to “hold yourself together”—as though her daughter is going to embarrass them all, there in the labor and delivery ward, by being too emotional while giving birth.
The third section centers on Kadiatou: her coming of age in Guinea and eventual journey to America with her young daughter, and from there, how she came to know Chiamaka and ultimately end up working at an upscale D.C. hotel as a maid. Kadiatou is very different from the other three women: She is Guinean, not Nigerian, and she is from a poor family and is largely uneducated—a background that sets her up to be victimized in an act of sexual violence that closely resembles the real-life case of New York v. Strauss-Kahn.
Finally, Adichie introduces us to Omelogor, a banker who offers jaundiced perspectives on her work in Nigeria’s male-dominated financial sector, her time in America studying pornography, and her work on “Robyn Hood” grants—financial aid she gives to Nigerian women who are starting or expanding their small businesses. Omelogor is brash and argumentative, hardened from years of helping politicians and businesspeople launder illegally obtained funds while quietly bearing her coworkers’ sexist insults.
THE BOOK IS MORE A COLLECTION of interconnected novellas than a traditional novel; there is no one narrative moving through the whole, although several plots or subplots are examined from all four perspectives. The crime perpetrated against Kadiatou and the resulting legal proceedings come closest to unifying the book on a narrative level, but ultimately it haunts the book without pulling together all its parts into a single plot.
This is partly the result of Adichie’s formal choices. Each of the women’s sections moves lightly over a period of more than twenty years, but it is difficult to confidently locate the novel’s “present” because Adichie relates these histories in a nonlinear fashion. The narrative is situated not on a common timeline but in the unconstrained domain of the characters’ minds, where threads of association and memory are followed wherever they go. So it is in life: The foolish thing you said to your spouse last night might elicit memories of all the other foolish things you have ever said, whether you said them two years ago or twenty; the moments in our lives that rhyme, when we think back over them, may be separated by decades.
Americanah was often at its best when it was operating in a satirical mode, and Dream Count is resplendent with Adichie’s wry wit. She applies it to some phenomena that happened so recently that we still haven’t seen their general uptake into fiction, as with the far-reaching but seemingly fast-forgotten social and cultural ramifications of COVID-19. Anxious about vectors of infection during the pandemic, one of Chiamaka’s brothers uses a spoon to press the buttons at an ATM; her other brother gets wind of this and haughtily explains: “‘The virus dies in seconds on solid surfaces. You just wasted a spoon.’ . . . A few days before, he had declared that ventilators were not the right treatment for coronavirus. He was an accountant.”
In the hospital following her assault, Kadiatou is given a small bag in which she finds “a toothbrush, toothpaste, soap, deodorant, hand cream, and pamphlets with pictures of women looking downcast.” Omelogor gets into a fight with a friend; the next day, after sending several “How are you?” texts and getting no reply, she writes her a more cryptic one: “We were not in equilibrium yesterday.” When the friend calls her to ask, “What does that even mean?” Omelogor deliciously replies, “I thought sending something stupid like that might make you react.”
It is Omelogor’s section in which the most biting satire in the book is concentrated, as she lampoons the various American academics she meets when she is at school. She comes by her bile honestly: After a particularly bad day in her master’s degree program, Omelogor drunkenly writes a long and angry post about her experiences for her advice blog dedicated to answering questions from men about women and dating. “America is so provincial,” she begins, later writing:
As soon as I started my program, so much I said was wrong but I did not know why it was wrong and they did not tell me because me asking why was wrong. They expected me to know. Welcome to the world of the Americans of the pious class. . . . They want your life to match their soft half-baked theories and when it doesn’t, they burst out with their provincial certainty. . . . They don’t know how to love, these pious people, and they don’t know love. Even the way they help each other is so cheerless and earnest.
Obviously, Omelogor can’t be responsibly read as a stand-in for Adichie: In novels for grownups, authors are under no obligation to telegraph endorsements or repudiations following potentially controversial statements from their characters. But it’s hard to avoid discerning a bit of extratextual spleen here related to the controversy (warranted or not) the author generated with her comments on trans women back in 2017.
The academics who police Omelogor’s language find her confusing and not easily categorized in their preconceptions of the world; on that basis, they ignore and dismiss her. Omelogor herself, unfamiliar with the jargon of progressive academia, can’t understand why the things she says end up generating such strong reactions. She and her critics appear unable to know each other, just as Chiamaka and her various ex-boyfriends could not know each other, just as Zikora and her mother struggle to understand each other, and just as Kadiatou and the skeptical prosecutors and well-intentioned doctors, for all the information they have at hand, cannot comprehend one another. These last characters, in particular, are separated by the gulfs of culture and procedure, to say nothing of the black hole that is the assault itself, which she and the professionals helplessly orbit in different, unconnected paths.
AFTER THE ASSAULT, KADIATOU would mostly just like to go home and see her daughter, but she is made to speak to her boss, police detectives, and medical professionals for a very long time. These scenes are as wrenching and horrible as any of the darkest moments in Half of a Yellow Sun, Adichie’s 2006 novel about the Biafran War.
As Kadiatou walks, a wave of anger seizes her, to think that she was doing her job, just doing her job, and a guest turned into a wild animal, and now she is in this hospital, with sick people being wheeled by, but she does not belong here, she is not sick.
Adichie is cautious, in an unusual note at the end of the book, to clarify that she does not know Nafissatou Diallo, the real-life woman who accused former IMF director Dominique Strauss-Kahn of assault. While she acknowledges that details of the fictional assault in the novel are drawn directly from Diallo’s real account of her experience, Adichie is careful to say that “nothing of Kadiatou’s pre-American life as recounted here is based on any known fact of Nafissatou’s,” and further, that she does “not know how Nafissatou Diallo felt because [she] cannot possibly know.” But she believes that by imagining the alleged crime in the context of “a fictional character’s life,” it is possible to “invite willing readers to join in this gesture of returned dignity.”
The inherent ambiguity of this profession of intent—who’s to say what Diallo herself might make of it—lifts the book’s central question out of the story itself and into a messy metatextual dimension. We are left in the province of the great mysteries—our real lives, where our mutual incomprehensibility is a painful living reality—as Adichie invites our contemplation of a portrait she has painted that only one human being, its subject, can properly evaluate.
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