The first thing to know about Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's latest book, Dream Count, is that it is about women. Four women, to be precise. (Why is it always that women are grouped into fours?) This is Adichie's first book in 12 years, after she conquered the New York Times bestseller list with her novel Americanah, which secured her place in the canon as a supreme chronicler of the immigrant experience. But even though Dream Count is set in the Covid era, it's as if no time since Americanah has passed at all. Adichie is hopelessly nostalgic for a feminism of yore. It may be best read in a pantsuit.
The novel features the loosely connected stories of Chiamaka, a winsome travel writer; Zikora, a lawyer whose boyfriend abandoned her while pregnant; Kadiatou, a hotel maid and Chiamaka’s housekeeper; and Omelegor, a scheming yet wayward businesswoman in Nigeria. Adichie's understanding of what it means to be a woman is that when you're not being abused by your own body, you are being let down or terrorized by men. Chiamaka, who goes through a string of truly reprehensible boyfriends, has fibroids that cause her to bleed through her pants. Zikora undergoes an excruciating birth and struggles to breastfeed her baby after the father of her child ghosts her. Kadiatou is forced into having a clitorectomy as a child. And then there is the episode where Omelegor's boob is slapped during sex, which inspires her to move to America to study pornography (she's against it).
I found Zikora's story to be the most interesting, although frustrating. When she tells her seemingly kind, well-to-do boyfriend, Kwame, that she's pregnant, he abruptly stops communicating with her for reasons unexplained and not reflected upon. In trying to track him down, Zikora calls his parents, with whom she had a warm relationship, and they intimate that Kwame told them the breakup was actually her fault. It's a bit too straightforwardly cruel to be believable. Zikora opts to have the baby, and her mother, with whom she has not always had the easiest relationship, comes to America to be by her side. When the baby is born, the ice melts: Zikora's mother relishes the tiny little boy, and in watching her Zikora feels new love for her son and her mother. Finally, the loss of Kwame doesn't hang as heavy. We don't miss him either.
Young, naive Chiamaka's section features some funny scenes that pillory academics and their obsession with being politically pure. They are the friends of her especially cruel boyfriend Darnell, who enjoys Chia's financial largesse (subsidized by her parents) but not her desire to be in a relationship with him. They look down on Chia because she is not what they want a Black woman to be; Chia tells Omelogor that one of them "doesn’t like me, but if I were a poor African, she would dislike me less." Chia, for her part, may feel alienated from them because she is not a grad student, and her travel writing is relegated to random websites based in New Zealand. As she flits about the world, dating insensitive white men, her dreams are marred by a feeling that she is not being recognized for who she is, except by the other characters in the book. But one feels a sense of enough ease that she will figure it all out someday, and luckily her parents bought her a house in which to do it.
Omelogor is the most vexing character—a wealthy, prickly, strident woman who uses her finance job in Nigeria to steal from the rich and give to the poor (through a foundation she calls Robyn Hood, ugh). But for reasons that remain somewhat opaque she gives it all up to get a master's degree in America. She writes an embarrassing advice blog called "For Men Only," similar to how Americanah's Ifemelu writes online about African immigrant experience. (What barely worked for Ifemelu's character does not work for Omelogor, and I beg Adichie to drop this cringey gimmick.) Once enrolled in an unnamed university in America, she is incorrigible. Her classmates are obsessed with political correctness. Her adviser is a fool. "Why was I doing this, forgetting I had choices?" She asks herself about her decision to pursue her master's. Great question.
Empathetic Kadiatou, who moonlights as Chiamaka's maid, is a perfect victim of a cascading series of tragedies. About halfway through her section, it becomes clear that her story is a fictionalized version of Dominique Strauss-Kahn's alleged rape of hotel maid Nafissatou Diallo in 2011. According to the Times, Adichie was told by her publisher, Knopf, that for "legal reasons" she had to write an author's note explaining that the character was not Diallo. Adichie claims that she was moved to write the character as a "gesture of returned dignity" to Diallo, whose charges against Strauss-Kahn were dropped. But this is a woman who disappeared from the public eye, and for good reason—the case was an excruciating and humiliating circus. To bring her into this book, even as an inspiration, seems strange and unnecessary.
Although this is a Covid novel, the pandemic is treated with a light touch, which is appreciated. The characters' dreams are thwarted more by the American machine than the reality of the virus. But at its core this is a book about a kind of bygone feminism. It's difficult to read Dream Count without thinking of the controversy Adichie courted in 2021. After two of her former students accused her of transphobia, Adichie revealed herself as the type of person who doesn't think she's transphobic, she just thinks that women are women and trans women are trans women (so, transphobic). In response to the accusations, Adichie wrote some ill-advised Tweets allying herself with J.K. Rowling and an odd anti–cancel culture screed on her website. This was an especially distasteful decision: What kind of teacher publicly attacks their former students? And when that teacher is a wildly successful novelist, writing from a place of power and international acclaim, the decision becomes even less defensible. That the women in Dream Count all suffer physical afflictions of womanhood, in this light, starts to feel very pointed and not particularly subtle.
That episode notwithstanding, Adichie remains a popular and decorated writer; Dream Count was an immediate bestseller. She's a celebrity in her native Nigeria and an eminent Ted Talker. I've liked Adichie’s past books. Americanah is both tragic and radiant, a love story that contains actual love. Purple Hibiscus and Half a Yellow Sun deal in darkness—religion, war, failed revolution—that is bracing but doesn't feel gratuitous. Dream Count, unfortunately, lacks the elegant storytelling and moral curiosity of her previous work. It's a tired polemic, and it doesn't speak to where we are now. Adichie's feminism is one in which accruing wealth is a retort to subjugation—one way to mitigate the depravities of being a woman is by having money. (Get that bag, girl!)
It all feels like a dispatch from the past, a declaration that whatever wave of feminism we were in 12 years ago still needs a champion. I wonder if Adichie's decision to rewrite Diallo's story all these years later was less about granting her dignity (after all, who is to say Diallo needs to receive this from anyone at this point?) but about returning to a time when everyone was reading her 2014 essay "We Should All Be Feminists" (later sampled by Beyonce.) If we are going to revisit previous eras of feminism, this feels like a particularly useless, though beautifully written, attempt. It's a shame, because we could use a smart, searching novel that has something to say about gender relations here and abroad in the Trump era that isn't so stale and reductive. Maybe one of Adichie's former students will write it.
