Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie feels contemporary culture is guilty of “shying away from the all-too human possibility of contradiction”. Her fourth novel, Dream Count, deals beautifully with the fallibility of perception. It is told from the perspectives of four connected women — travel writer Chia, who grew up in Nigeria but lives in America, her best friend Zikora, her outspoken cousin Omelogor and her housekeeper, Kadiatou. The reader is treated to rich portraits of their love lives, their desires and their experiences of womanhood, from childbirth and painful periods to the indignity and unfairness of a ticking body clock.
The novel opens unglamorously in the middle of the pandemic, with Chia worrying about having touched her face before washing her hands and having dismal discussions over Zoom about loo roll shortages. Yet lockdown is a vehicle for Chia to do that very 2020 thing: to pause and reflect. She looks back on a catalogue of failed romances which have culminated in her being “confronted with the crime of singleness” in her forties, with relatives begging her to get IVF.
First there is Darnell, a moody intellectual who is contemptuous of Chia’s frivolous travel writing and family money (her father is a wealthy businessman in Nigeria) yet also preoccupied with the spoils of it. Chia is constantly seeking the approval of Darnell and his sanctimonious academic friends, who are “tribal, but anxiously so” and describe everything as “problematic”. To them, Chia is a contradiction. As her cousin puts it: “They can’t stand rich people from poor countries, because it means they can’t feel sorry for you.”
Others attempt to mould Chia into the person they think she ought to be: a New York editor expresses interest in her, but asks if she’ll write about, say, the war in Sudan.
Our expectations are confounded in real time alongside the characters. There is Chuka, the man who seems so square, who wears his shirt tucked in even at weekends and reads books about leadership and project management. Chia has sex with him not because she wants to, but because “he somehow deserved it, being so proper and attentive”. She thinks the sex will be pedestrian, yet he ends up proving her “unutterably wrong”. Chia pivots from describing him as a strait-laced bore to admitting that “Chuka was my old fashioned fantasy: a manly man”. Just as in real life, the characters’ perceptions of each other are constantly overwriting themselves.
If you’d like to read more by Adichie
Half of a Yellow Sun
Adichie’s second novel is about the Nigerian Civil War — it won the 2007 Women’s Prize for fiction
Americanah
Her third, beautifully observed, novel follows Ifemelu as she moves from Nigeria to study in America
Notes on Grief
A non-fiction book published in 2021, after the death of her father, James Nwoye Adichie, in the first wave of Covid
Dream Count is Adichie’s first novel since Americanah, which was published in 2013. If that was a coming-of-age story, then Dream Count examines what happens when the happily ever after doesn’t quite go to plan. The author had writer’s block in the years between the two novels, during which she had her first child. Adichie has spoken of the “violence” and animalistic nature of childbirth, which is reflected in the novel through Zikora’s own experience of feeling “briefly and brutishly reduced” to an animal in the delivery room.
Adichie’s fiction has a lightness of touch and never feels instructive
Women’s bodies and the tribulations they go through are a constant theme. While Adichie is both political and politicised, her fiction has a lightness of touch that never feels instructive. Unlike Sally Rooney, whose books about love and relationships are punctuated by characters having lengthy discussions about socialist ideology which feel like authorial interjections, Adichie’s writing about love and relationships naturally makes space for her feminism.
Adichie is the master of writing about feelings which are difficult to put a finger on, whether it’s the “exquisite ache of wanting to love a lovely person that you do not love,” or the way our minds work in the counterfactual when we think about regret. Chia, looking back on her failed relationships, says this: “I grieved what I did not even know to be true, that there was someone out there who had passed me by, who might not just have loved me but have truly known me.”
Adichie often says she is preoccupied with telling the truth. How often you will read a line from Dream Count and think how utterly true it is.
Claudia Cockerell is editor of Londoner’s Diary
