In Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s latest novel Dream Count, one of the protagonists, Chiamaka, has a boyfriend who stops “reading the pink pages of the Financial Times”. He switches to the iPad version instead. This is not the only time real life rears its head in Adichie’s fictional world: the novel begins with a Nigerian writer wrestling with the isolation of the Covid-19 pandemic. It ends with an extended “Author’s Note” about Nafissatou Diallo, the 32-year-old Guinean hotel maid who accused Dominique Strauss-Kahn, then head of the IMF, of sexual assault in 2011.
Between those two counterpoints is what might otherwise be understood as a fairly unremarkable story about three affluent Nigerian women: Chiamaka, the writer; her best friend Zikora, a lawyer; and her cousin Omelogor, a financial executive. Over the course of the novel, they navigate their mid-thirties, wrangle with romance and manage the dislocations of diasporic identity in the US. When Chiamaka reflects on a series of disappointing exes, Zikora calls this her “body count”, but the idealistic Chiamaka insists that really it is a “dream count”.
What elevates the story is, as ever, the emotional acuity of Adichie’s writing — something that will be familiar to readers of her previously lauded novels: Purple Hibiscus (2003), which won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize; Half of a Yellow Sun (2007), which won the Orange Prize for Fiction; and Americanah (2013), which won a National Book Critics Circle Award. When Chiamaka reflects on an unworthy ex called Darrell, Adichie grants her the full measure of her disappointment: “More than marriage, I was looking for what I then did not know as the resplendence of being truly known.” It’s a lingering insight and the sort that Adichie offers in abundance.
But more than 10 years on from Americanah, this latest book is infused with something new and distinctive in Adichie’s prose: a crystal-clear purposefulness, moral and furious. This purpose coheres around the fourth protagonist Kadiatou, a sorrowful housekeeper and a transparently fictionalised version of hotel maid Diallo. Though Chiamaka, Zikora and Omelogor are animated, reflective company, it’s with the reticent figure of Kadiatou that Adichie proves the seriousness of this novel’s intent. Through her, she asks how it is that ordinary women can survive lives of hardship, violence and degradation — and yet continue to harbour dreams for their daughters.
The pandemic serves as the novel’s framing device and Chiamaka likens it to a crack that “appears in the sky and widens and reveals us to ourselves”. Well, perhaps. Dream Count will belong to that emerging genre of “pandemic novels”, clearly written in and about a state of crisis that crystallises certain truths about loneliness, desire and our duties of care to each other. What’s less clear is that it needs the pandemic to get to those truths. Still, Adichie is alert to the absurdities of it all too. “You went out!” Chiamaka rebukes Zikora down the phone, discovering her queueing for toilet paper at Walmart, concluding: “I think it’s finally time for us to start washing our bums.”
Zikora’s story forms the second of the five interlocked chapters of Dream Count and derives from one of Adichie’s earlier short stories (“Zikora”, published in 2020) about a successful lawyer who falls pregnant only to be abandoned by the baby’s father. Placed here, it feels oddly discrete. What connects it to the rest of the novel, however, is a broader theme about the betrayal of women by men, their dependence on each other and the righteousness of their rage.
Zikora’s bewilderment gives way to anger. Meeting Chuka, another of Chiamaka’s boyfriends, she sees in him only the “vile scam of man’s public goodness”. Adichie plants here a blazing fury and it informs what will, later in the novel, become a powerful female solidarity around Kadiatou. If the world is disillusionment and despair, Adichie seems to say, then let us look to the friendships forged between women and the bond between mothers and daughters.
For Chiamaka, the problem with Chuka is that he wears his shirts neatly tucked, reads books about project management and listens to the BBC World News. Gazing upon his tan-coloured furniture, she realises their fundamental incompatibility, but Adichie also grants her a deeper understanding: “I broke up with Chuka because I could no longer ignore that exquisite ache of wanting to love a lovely person that you do not love.”
Less persuasive is Adichie’s rendering of the dissatisfied Omelogor, who turns from banking to blogging and a PhD in cultural studies. When her classmates accuse her of “weaponizing” family tragedies, she is irritated by “perfect righteous American liberals”. Here Adichie turns a sharp eye to the moral puritanism of the liberal west, but it’s a criticism based on what seems a thin caricature.
Yet by the end of the novel, all three women are galvanised in their determination to protect Kadiatou when the news of her being assaulted in a hotel room at the hands of a powerful man exposes her and her daughter to merciless public judgment. Watching Kadiatou be interviewed by a female journalist, Omelogor observes how “Kadiatou is unknowable to her, Kadiatou is a curiosity, Kadiatou exists outside of her imagination.” Yet this is the challenge Adichie faces too: how to do justice to a powerless woman reduced to disgrace by those with immense power? Adichie chooses to write Kadiatou with compassion, granting her the dignity that Diallo was denied.
Omelogor laments the interviewer’s inability to understand Kadiatou’s “right to dream”. But if this is beyond the scope of journalism, for Adichie it is entirely within the realm of fiction. The novel’s last image is a kind of dream and one you hope that counts. In her “Author’s Note”, Adichie admits to seeking “to ‘write’ a wrong in the balance of stories”, offering “clear-eyed realism, but touched by tenderness”. Realism, yes, but tenderness most of all.
Dream Count by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Fourth Estate £20 / Knopf $32, 416 pages
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