Novels had always felt more real to me than what was, one of the characters is adamant in Dream Count, the highly anticipated new novel by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. It is a sentence echoed in the accompanying author’s note, where it contends that the “point of art is to look at our world and be moved by it, and then to go through a series of attempts at clearly seeing that world, interpreting it, questioning it.”.
Since she started out with her phenomenally self-assured debut book, Purple Hibiscus, in 2003, Adichie’s fiction has performed this work of gazing, making sense and demanding great amounts of praise, earning her huge awards, and a public visibility way broader than the majority of writers, whose books have not been sampled by Beyoncé.
In keeping with her superstar reputation, Dream Count is hailed as “a publishing event 10 years in the making” and is perhaps the most secure forecast to date for this year’s Women’s prize. But it also precedes its release by tough personal circumstances: Adichie’s father died in June 2020, and then, just over a year later, in March 2021, her mother died, after which, she explains in the author’s note, her “life’s cover was ripped off.”.
Having already examined her father’s death in her longer essay Notes on Grief, Dream Count, Adichie maintains is “really about my mother”. Composed of the interwoven lives of four women, Chiamaka (“Chia”), Zikora, Omelogor and Kadiatou, it is also quintessentially Adichie: ambitious, acute and propelled by a cluster of feather-light sentences that accumulate to crushing weight.
The women are immigrants in the US. Travel writer Chia, lawyer Zikora, retired bank cashier and graduate student Omelogor, and Kadiatou, hotel maid, are Nigerian or Guinean, respectively. Chia’s first-person narrative establishes the sad tone for the novel: “I’ve always wanted to be known,” she says in the opening sentence, “really known, by another human being.” Boarding on being out of her mind with recalling past lovers under the Covid lockdowns, she whiles away her days “mourning 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 really known me.”. Her story unfolds to Zikora’s, who is desperately searching for the boyfriend who dumped her after a surprise pregnancy and whose own story transforms, with a whiplash of unanticipated sweetness, into a paean to the allure of motherhood. The story is then torn in two by Kadiatou’s tragedy before succumbing to Omelogor’s fantasies regarding how she indulged her randy life in Abuji before abandoning the high-level corporate life to conduct postgraduate research on pornography.
Dream Count’s most delights are in how Adichie prioritizes the women’s roles as outsiders, and therefore observers, of American culture (Kadiatou remarks, for example, that American police wear tight clothing because “they don’t run, American police, they shoot more than they run”), or of hetero relationships (Omelogor starts a blog called For Men Only, which dishes out such richly witty one-liners as: “Dear men, I know that you don’t like abortion but the best way to lower abortion is to keep an eye on where your male bodily fluids go”). Thus, and also because it is full of obsessions that a lesser writer might have sorted into a conventional marriage plot – Chia’s desire for love, Zikora’s delirious search to reclaim her ex; even the proudly independent Omelogor’s “deepest longing” is “for marriage” – the novel is squarely reminiscent of Adichie’s previous novel, Americanah.
But so perfect is the beauty of Adichie’s masterful sentences, as clear as clever windowpanes, that there is no choice but to look more closely, and to see that what these women desire is eternally out of reach. The real drama takes place in the hermetically sealed tunnel of memory, in individuals speaking to each other over computer screens while in isolation, or, as is the case with Kadiatou’s – as her dreams are shattered by an incident that replicates 2011 charges on Dominique Strauss-Kahn – in the high-end hotel room locked where she endures every woman’s nightmare. In looping around this episode, the novel steers away from the idea of romantic love while circling repeatedly – increasingly in a skeptical frame of mind – back to its urgent central question: can one ever truly know another human being? The life of Kadiatou is not understood nor well explained by the authorities nor by the press, nor indeed even by those persons who occupy a public function and are publicly to be for her; they simplify it away through the notion that they “have heard the same story over and over, in different contexts, from different kinds of women, but eventually the same one”. It isn’t the same one, though; and the idea. Adichie’s observant way of viewing digs up minute, ghastly, significant details; the way “even in her shock [Kadiatou] was afraid to hurt him,” how her foremost concern afterward is if she still has a place to go, how she wants she’d gotten to calm down, to not tell what had happened, so “all would be normal now.”.
This novel is ultimately more wide-ranging than Americanah, with a mosaic of womanhood constructed around this moment but weaving childbirth and pregnancy loss, abortions and hysterectomies, fibroids and female genital mutilation, sexual assault and sexual harassment, as if nothing short of the whole of female experience is within its scope. But in doing so, it is also beautifully introspective, not only because it is being written in the context of the Covid pandemic, a ready-made memento of “how breakable we all are”, but also because it has so many moments – such as when, musing over one of her breakups, Chia wonders on “how quickly mystery dissolves to dust” – in which one senses the subliminal reach back towards deeper traumas, the sense of strangling entrapment with floating disconnection, the hermetic numbness with which so many of us find ourselves meeting grief.
Or perhaps I was nudged into this feeling by Adichie suggesting that her late mother would have known Kadiatou as her “fellow woman”. I don’t know when I last came across an author’s note so emotionally charged, suggesting as it does that part of the key to the central mystery of the novel lies in its gentle respect for the connections between its central female characters, in its analysis of the power of woman’s solidarity, something as close to fame as most of us are likely to get.
