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Dream Count by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie review – candid conversations with friends | Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie


Had it become possible to forget that Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is a very good novelist? More than 10 years have passed since her last novel, Americanah, and in that time she’s become a bona fide star (name another author who would be asked to advertise makeup or have their writing sampled by Beyoncé), a public figure whose influence extends beyond readers of her breakout novel, the Orange prize-winning Nigeria-Biafra war epic Half of a Yellow Sun (2006).

Like Americanah and her story collection The Thing Around Your Neck, Adichie’s new novel, Dream Count – a big book, richly marbled with criss-crossing storylines, dramatic but not plotty – is poised between Nigeria and the US. Where those earlier books were often concerned with eyeing American mores from immigrant vantage points, this one is more a bumper compilation of middle-aged life experience, built around the friendship of three Nigerian women whose lives haven’t panned out as imagined with respect to marriage and motherhood – a state of affairs to which the book delivers a full-throated “so what?” while refusing to sideline any potential for heartache and regret.

But if Chiamaka, Zikora and Omelogor aren’t each paired up as their Igbo families expected, the problem is men: the slightly hard-to-parse title, with its faint echo of “body count”, portends a patient tallying of hopes repeatedly dashed by innumerable inadequates. We’re in Washington DC in early 2020 when the novel kicks off. There’s talk amid ominous news from Wuhan that “human-to-human transmission” isn’t possible, and someone’s using the end of a teaspoon to key in their pin at the ATM, but while Adichie deftly captures the prevailing atmosphere of pre-lockdown uncertainty, the pandemic is only a backdrop for reminiscence as the first of the novel’s four main characters, 44-year-old travel writer Chiamaka, starts Googling old boyfriends, setting the stage for a totting-up of shitty guys, or “thieves of time”, per her best friend, Zikora.

Chiamaka, the youngest child and only daughter of a wealthy Nigerian businessman (“Jesus fucking Christ. Is that actually his net worth?” someone asks, searching his name), recounts half a dozen ill-chosen affairs, from a two-timing academic who answers her question about where they stand by telling her that’s “a hackneyed question lifted from the contemporary morass that is pop culture”, to a secretly married Englishman met online in London. Whatever the relationship, Chiamaka ends up alone, unless you count the sisterhood, continued in lockdown over Zoom, of Zikora, a lawyer, and Chiamaka’s enjoyably sharp-tongued cousin, Omelogor, a double-dealing banker in Abuja. There’s also Chimaka’s Guinean housekeeper, Kadiatou, who came to the US after the death of her father in a mining accident, and whose perspective also gets equivalent airtime at the book’s halfway point.

Adichie’s storytelling proceeds with stately virtuosity, regularly detonating chain reactions of understanding as illuminating anecdotes rise to the surface seemingly randomly. A baggy book of backstory could lack momentum but Dream Count doesn’t flag or sag, partly because it continually deepens and reframes our understanding of the women at the book’s heart – sometimes, it seems, with every passing sentence – but also because there’s just so much going on: in one three-page stretch, we see Kadiatou suffer a miscarriage, the death of her newborn, and then her husband, before she’s accosted by soldiers barging into her workplace. The turn that her narrative eventually takes – the centrepiece of the novel – draws on Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s alleged rape of a Guinean hotel worker in 2011, a mark of no little chutzpah on Adichie’s part (ditto, her note explaining that she’s done so as “a gesture of returned dignity”), but the episode absolutely comes to life on the page through her persuasive freshness of detail. In the aftermath, Kadiatou only panics all the more at the newfound vulnerability in her manager’s eyes, faced with news of the assault.

But it’s not just the grim or lurid stuff: Dream Count sings with the sheer concentration of the kind of experience novels usually ignore. Omelogor describes having sex with a pot-bellied, small-penised lover who asks, “Am I hurting you?”, to her retrospective derision; there’s a description of a postpartum perineal tear, as well as the fear of breaking the stitches during a bout of constipation; someone gets a rash from her lover’s insistence on using a particular kind of beard oil.

If Americanah sometimes seemed reverse-engineered to address topical talking points – part of the novel was told in the form of a character’s blog posts – the handling of sensitive issues (the impact of pornography, say, or Instagram-fuelled worries about body image) are incorporated more smoothly here into light-footed dialogue. Yes, familiar fun is had at the expense of people who say things are “problematic”, not to mention a white editor who wants more “relevance” from Chiamaka’s travel writing (“Congo and the struggles of the people there would really resonate right now… Somalia or Sudan would work too”), but Adichie’s social portraiture is usually more generous than just satirical. That generosity extends to the reader, too: less a family saga than a friendship saga, Dream Count practically gives us four novels for the price of one, each of them powered by the simple but evergreen thrill of time spent in the company of flesh and blood characters lavishly imagined in the round. It was worth the wait.

Dream Count by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is published by 4th Estate (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply



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