The novel as a raging beast

In Dream Count, her first novel since 2013’s Americanah, the Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie uses her incisive prose to excoriate liberal hypocrisies, interfering aunties, American society and culture, the French, the international elite whose corruption and greed plagues and pillages African nations, the racist medical system that treats Black women’s bodies as dispensable, and, of course, men of all races and religions and nationalities.

Four women are at the centre of Adichie’s novel: two are cousins from Nigeria, Chiamaka, a travel writer who lives in suburban Maryland, and Omelogor, who is a banker in Abuja. The third is Zikora, Chiamaka’s best friend, who is also Nigerian and a hotshot corporate lawyer who lives in Washington DC. The fourth is Kadiatou, Chiamaka’s housekeeper, who has immigrated from Guinea to the USA.

The story begins with the first lockdown of the Covid pandemic and is told, initially, from the point of view of Chiamaka (one of two characters who narrate their parts of the book, the other being Omelogor). Stuck at home in solitary splendour, Chiamaka whiles away time logging on to Zoom calls with family and friends, but there’s no comfort to be had there: “Soon the Zoom calls became a mélange of hallucinatory images. At the end of each call, I felt lonelier than before, not because the call had ended but that it had been made at all. To talk was to remember all that was lost.”

And then one day she discovers a grey hair on her head that soon has her spiralling: “I’m growing old and the world has changed and I have never been truly known.” She’s forced to reminisce about the missed chances of romantic connection with a series of men. It’s this personal audit of failed romantic relationships that gives the novel its title — while outside the virus is ravaging countries and the body count ticks upwards, Chiamaka, the softest and the one most in love with the idea of love among the quartet, is counting her broken and vanished dreams.

The second part of Dream Count is about Zikora, the lawyer, who is slightly more cynical than Chiamaka and considers men “thieves of time”. For Zikora, a devout Catholic, a conventional marriage with an accomplished, loving man had long been a dream and the election of Pope Francis is a sign of better things to come: “A new pope meant a new beginning and she desperately needed to believe that it was not too late for her, almost thirty-nine years old and the future a wasteland scrubbed of eligible men.”

Imagining that your romantic fortunes might be on an upward trajectory because your favourite priest has been elected as the head of your church would seem an almost comical clutching at straws and yet, Adichie manages to get under the skin of Zikora and lay open her longings with compassion so the reader is not laughing at this accomplished woman but identifying with her loneliness and vulnerability.

While there’s an undercurrent of anger that courses through Adichie’s prose when telling Chiamaka’s and Zikora’s stories, it’s with the remaining two characters that Dream Count blows the doors wide open and the novel seems to become a raging beast.

In Kadiatou’s section of the book, Adichie fictionalises the former IMF head Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s alleged sexual assault of a hotel worker, Nafissatou Diallo. In her author’s note at the end of the book, Adichie explains this choice as “The creative impulse can be roused by the urge to right a wrong, no matter how obliquely.” Diallo had been failed in real life by the American media, the justice system and the “country she trusted”. Adichie chooses to “…‘write’ a wrong in the balance of stories” and succeeds. Kadiatou’s story is a convincing version of that miscarriage of justice, an indictment of the shallowness of American ideals that tend to be valorised in the popular imagination.

The most fiery of the four women, Omelogor, whose story is told in the penultimate part, is the most underserved in terms of plot. Which is too bad — because here is a woman who chooses to stay back in her homeland, refuses to marry, makes a career as a banker willing to bend the laws, and carries out guerrilla acts of philanthropy to better the lives of women in her country. I did wish Adichie had stayed with Omelogor more and dispensed with the return to Chiamaka’s story in the final part that waters down Dream Count’s ending.

In her author’s note, Adichie explains how the book is really about her own mother and losing her. Her mother, she says, would “have liked the character of Kadiatou”, and if she had read Dream Count, would have sighed and said with “…fellow feeling…my fellow women.” And really, it’s impossible for a woman to read Dream Count and not echo those words.