Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s ‘Dream Count’ is powerful but awkward

Dream Count
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
4th Estate

I have been a fan of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s writing since the days of Half of a Yellow Sun and Americanah, so a new novel after a 10-year gap from this Nigerian/American author is something to celebrate. Here she focuses on four women: three living in America and one in Nigeria.

The novel opens with Chiamaka, a travel writer who lives in America, contemplating her life at the beginning of the pandemic lockdown. We learn about her background — she is the Nigerian equivalent of a trust-fund kid, the child of very wealthy parents, who likes her travelling to be luxurious and glamorous — and her past romantic entanglements. She is kind, funny and always seems to be searching for something that is just out of reach.

Next we meet Zikora, Chiamaka’s best friend, who also lives in America and is a lawyer, searching for love, only to be disappointed. She is also wealthy and successful, as is Omelogor, Chiamaka’s cousin, who is still based in Nigeria and has risen up the ranks of Nigerian finance — a not-always-honest sector. But having got to the top through fair means and foul, she decides to attend an American university to study, of all things, pornography, and to set up a website to “educate” men on the subject.

The fourth woman, Kadiatou, is somewhat different. She is also based in America, but grew up in rural Guinea, poor and less educated than the three Nigerians. She works as a domestic and as a hotel chambermaid to earn money to give her young daughter a better chance in life than she has had. And here Adichie shifts away from exploring the lives and choices of wealthy, successful women on the cusp of middle age and still uncertain of what they really want, to something rather different.

Drawing on the real-life case that concerned the chief of the International Monetary Fund, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, who was accused of rape by an immigrant hotel worker, Adichie, having given Kadiatou a backstory, has her at the mercy of the American judicial system, having been raped by an influential man, a guest in the hotel where she is working. And, while the telling of Kadiatou’s story is powerful and poignant, to some extent it throws the rest of the book out of balance.

There are times when Dream Count feels like two different novels that have been strung together. The one deals with women who on the surface are successfully competing in a world where they could have been seen as alien, but who are still searching for more than they seem able to reach — a search for the kind of success in their private lives that they have managed in their public ones. And on the other hand, we see a woman who has all the odds stacked against her and while — without wanting to give spoilers — she can be counted as having been treated horribly in her public life, she will ultimately achieve a personal catharsis.

Adichie’s writing is compelling, and Dream Count always holds one's attention. There is humour, outrage and wit, but Kadiatou’s life experience is so removed from that of the other characters, however much they interact with her, that it makes for a slightly uneasy blend.