Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Frustrating Return

In the 12 years since releasing her best-selling novel Americanah, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has published prolifically but not primarily as a writer of literary fiction. Instead, she has ventured into other forms: memoir, children’s literature, feminist manifesto, a public lecture on free speech. When Beyoncé sampled Adichie’s TedX Talk “We Should All Be Feminists” Adichie transformed from an acclaimed postcolonial novelist into a pop-public intellectual. Few artists’ work can survive such notoriety—see F. Scott Fitzgerald, Joseph Heller, Salman Rushdie, and Haruki Murakami, to name a few famous writers whose later work suffered; celebrity is good for sales and frequently bad for art.

Adichie’s fourth novel, Dream Count, proves that she is still a gifted storyteller, yet her fame has indeed affected her work. Dream Count comprises four linked novellas (as well as an epilogue-esque chapter), and each section follows a different woman’s, well, dreams. There’s Chiamaka, a hopeless-romantic travel writer who yearns for a soulmate; Zikora, an ambitious lawyer who wants to have both a high-powered career and a picture-perfect family; Kadiatou, a long-suffering maid who seeks opportunity in America; and Omelogor, a depressed graduate student who craves intellectual freedom. Adichie’s writing is as confident as ever, and she retains her talent for rendering heterosexual intimacy — a bad boyfriend “wanted the unusual more than he wanted the true,” while a Christian dating site “felt ghostly, with too few men, and even fewer Black men.”

That immersive storytelling allows Dream Count to nearly pass for a successful work of psychological realism about love, friendship, immigration, and making a life of one’s own — a pretty good story. But Adichie’s oeuvre has always been about both individual people and the social contexts that shape them, and, similarly, this book is not just a tale of four women’s lives; it’s also about the social worlds those women inhabit. And as a broader social novel — Dream Count falls short. At best, the book presents a Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus picture of gender relations; at worst, it is a blandly regressive take on progressive Americans, who, in these pages, are two-dimensional caricatures sketched from conservative talking points rather than the fully formed characters one expects to encounter in literary fiction.

The novel’s regressive strain will not surprise those who have tracked Adichie’s public missteps. In case you missed them — in 2017, Adichie made transphobic comments to the British news outlet Channel 4, referring to trans women as men who enjoy male privilege only to “switch gender” as though on a whim. Four years later, partly in response to the behavior of two former students who critiqued her for those comments, Adichie published a blog post decrying cancel culture. The ensuing internet imbroglio was predictable — right-wing culture warriors including Piers Morgan and Bari Weiss took Adichie’s side, while trolls harassed her detractors. Lost in the shuffle were the artistic implications of her post, which read less like the work of a thoughtful, curious fiction writer and more like the ranting of your average excessively online TERF. Adichie sought sympathy for the “vulnerability that comes with fame” without extending sympathy to trans people who found her comments harmful; she flung accusatory clichés about millennial snowflakes while calling for a more nuanced public discourse. In retrospect, the post foreshadowed the fiction that was to come.

In her earlier years, one of Adichie’s great powers as a writer was her ability to simultaneously tell a good story and level an implicit critique — to move fluidly between character and idea and, often, to capture the ways that ideologies are insufficient explanations for lived, human reality. The daughter of Nigeria’s first professor of statistics and the country’s first female university registrar, Adichie populates her fiction with intellectuals — persecuted journalists, aspiring novelists, lecturers on strike; writers on fellowship, writers hosting salons, writers at writing conferences. In the past, she treated those people’s theories as living, mutable things that she carefully wove into the books’ dramatic tapestries.

Take Adichie’s most heroic undertaking, Half of a Yellow Sun (2006). The novel is both an epic about individual people caught up in the Biafran War as well as a commentary on the way those people conceive of postcolonial identity. Americanah, though lighter fare, is also a book of characters and ideas — a romance as well as a bemused meditation on American notions of racial identity. In those novels, one can find both drama and comedy, as when, in Yellow Sun, a British writer begs his Nigerian houseboy for local herbs to revive his flaccid penis, only to be told that such herbs don’t work on white men.

Adichie, in other words, once excelled at the fundamental novelistic task of parceling out her sympathies and critiques between subjects, never allowing any one character to be wholly in the right or wholly in the wrong. In turn, her fiction felt lively and polyphonic. By contrast, though Adichie writes from four POVs in Dream Count, she maintains only a superficial interest in different perspectives, and she abandons the novelist’s task of placing those perspectives in narrative conflict. In doing so, she neglects the moral and thematic intricacies innate to a good social novel.

Where the ideas in Yellow Sun and Americanah accrete meaning, evolving with the multidimensional characters who espouse them—revolutionary secessionism dampened by the horrors of wartime; the American Dream soured by actually living in the U.S. — Dream Count’s relationship to its thematic material, gender, is one-note. Three of the protagonists — Chiamaka, the travel writer; Zikora, the lawyer; and Omelogor, the banker turned grad student — hold similar views about money (there’s nothing wrong with being wealthy, especially if you’re a woman), sex (gentle and knowing is good; rough and anonymous is bad), and, most of all, men (they’re trash!). Careless men gift you scented candles when you hate scented candles; snobbish men berate you if you order a mimosa in Paris; the “thieves of time” never propose; the jerks who don’t tell you they are married, ghost pregnant girlfriends, or have secret families; and the truly vile men abuse, rape, and gaslight.

None of Adichie’s portrayals of men are necessarily incorrect, but Dream Count is so uncritically hung up on its men that it neglects its women. The man-fixation is especially odd in light of pleas Adichie has made in her own work, including in 2017’s Dear Ijeawele, or A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions, for women to stop spending so much time cataloguing the “terrible things” men do to women — cheating, lying, ghosting. A younger Adichie might have suggested including more of “our own stuff,” or at least training a more discerning eye on that stuff, in Dream Count.

Of the four characters in Dream Count, the one most unlike the others is Chiamaka’s industrious Guinean Muslim housekeeper, Kadiatou, the protagonist of the third novella and moral center of the book. In a postscript, Adichie writes that she based Kadiatou on the real-life Nafissatou Diallo, the hotel worker who accused IMF head and French presidential hopeful Dominique Strauss Kahn of sexual assault in 2011. Adichie vividly and sympathetically narrates Kadiatou’s story, from a harrowing scene of female genital mutilation to an internationally publicized rape case. But the section reads like hagiography — the whole novel ends on an image of Kadiatou and her daughter, “two thoroughly decent people … holding hands, their faces bathed in light” — and for a reason. Adichie reflects in her author’s note that, in drawing on Diallo’s story, she wanted to “ ‘write’ a wrong in the balance of stories.”

Rebalancing the weight society gives powerful men’s narratives over marginalized women’s is a commendable political goal, but it causes Adichie novelistic problems on a character and story level. As a character, Kadiatou is less inhabited than the other characters; she is a morally perfect victim whose gravest misstep is almost lying on her asylum application. As for plot, Kadiatou’s story line fails to meaningfully intersect with the other women’s narratives. There is a promising premise for conflict: Though well-meaning Chiamaka, Zikora, and Omelogor assist in Kadiatou’s legal case against the rapist, Kadiatou herself would rather not become a crusader. This is a classically novelistic situation (indeed, a classically Adichie plot) — the privileged women’s insistence on justice contrasting with the survivor’s desire to put the whole thing behind her. But Adichie never converts that premise into plot; she offers neither dramatic nor thematic payoff. The consequence is that none of the women’s perspectives on gender or power has a chance to challenge or complicate any of the others — and thus the reader’s.

The most explicit engagement with feminist ideas — the book’s intellectual stakes — arrives in the final novella of Dream Count. That section follows Omelogor, the most outspoken member of the group. Unmarried and childless at 46, Omelogor lives happily in Abuja, where she hosts dinner parties and is surrounded by members of her chosen family — a gay man, a child she takes in part-time after hitting her with a car, and a woman to whom she seems romantically drawn, among others. On the side, Omelogor writes a cringey blog called “For Men Only,” where she advises men on topics ranging from the art of apologizing to women (“be specific”) to pornography (“it teaches you so much nonsense”). Omelogor challenges some heteronormative conventions: She advises Zikora to propose to a man herself rather than waiting for him to pop the question and tells her own meddling aunt, who harangues her to adopt a child, “There is always another way to live.” Through Omelogor, Adichie seems poised to articulate something fresh about what it means to be a woman under patriarchy.

Alas, that is not what happens. Instead Adichie makes a hard right turn away from what might be a satisfying engagement with gender and into diatribes about cancel culture and American liberal hypocrisy. We follow Omelogor as she quits her job as a corrupt banker (corrupt in a feminist way; she steals money from rich clients to offer microloans to female entrepreneurs in a scheme she calls “Robyn Hood”) to a graduate student and anti-porn feminist. (Omelogor develops her anti-porn convictions after a man slaps her breast during sex; only the man’s porn diet can explain this impulse.) When Omelogor heads to the U.S. to earn a master’s in cultural studies, Dream Count jumps the shark.

The students and faculty at Omelogor’s school are all plausibly obnoxious — a professor grants an undergrad an extension on a paper because his dog has an ear infection; grad students call banking “inherently flawed” but do not know enough about finance to discuss it further. Omelogor’s only fleeting friendship in school is a Nigerian conservative who a white South African classmate calls “a Federalist Society asshole,” but who, to Omelogor, is the only person “who was not looking for all that was wrong in me.” It’s an intriguing alliance that Adichie neglects to explore beyond a few paragraphs extolling the conservative’s capacity for open debate, so unlike the pugilistic progressives.

This is typical of Dream Count, which, despite critiquing lefty academics’ obsession with civility over discourse (“as if their quiet evil isn’t the real incivility”), is itself intellectually hollow, as Adichie refuses to sincerely grapple with any of her characters’ ideas. Take Omelogor’s adviser, who correctly points out that Omelogor’s thesis is half-baked (she wants to write about pornography “as an educational tool” but has nothing to say about its educational function). When the adviser suggests that Omelogor acknowledge, in her research, the idea that sex work is work, Adichie’s narration dismisses her — “Everything she said was soft and sank in when it touched.” What if Omelogor really did have to engage with such a viewpoint? What if her grand theories of the world bumped up against a reality that challenged them? Adichie has said she thinks of herself not as a feminist luminary (despite publishing two books with feminist in the title) but as a storyteller. But ideas and narrative are inextricable from one another, and Dream Count’s intellectual thinness shortchanges the stories Adichie wants to tell.

In the social novel, plot is the dramatic source of moral complication, the tool writers use to explore the disconnect between our ideas of the world and the messiness of real life. Plot also allows writers to place distance between themselves and their subjects, letting readers both empathize with and critique characters. But in Dream Count, instead of diligently crafting a plot that dramatizes the ideological tensions she wishes to comment on, Adichie merely rants, often in language that recalls her 2021 blog post in which she critiqued her former students’ — two queer Nigerian writers — criticisms of her as “mediocre malice,” “the false gauziness of ideological purity,” and “parrot[ting] the latest American Feminist orthodoxy.” Similarly, in Dream Count, she heaps derisive epithets on American liberals, who are “a biased referee pretending to be fair,” “parroting robot[s] … heedlessly drunk on their certainties,” leaving “no room for dissent,” who are willing to forgive “evilness” “as long as you board their ideology train.” Adichie’s writing here isn’t merely uncurious — the prose is also often bad: “They can’t see because their hearts lack eyes. Their hearts are blind.” This is the sanctimonious language of social media — the tone and medium Adichie criticized in her 2021 blog post — not of a nuanced social novel.

The most revealing moment in Dream Count comes when Omelogor describes “a famous academic feminist” who “didn’t like women. She liked only the idea of women.” The famous academic feminist gatekeeps: “She posted cryptic quotes about feminism that you were supposed to feel guilty about but not understand, and vaguely threatening conditions for how to be a feminist, like if you don’t know blah blah blah about Bangladesh then you’re no feminist, if you don’t liberate this and that then you’re no feminist.” What exactly the blah blah blah about Bangladesh refers to, we never learn. Maybe it has something to do with labor? Might Omelogor, the banker turned microlender, or Adichie, the feminist who has expressed skepticism about intersectionality — benefit from engaging with this blah blah blah?

Men can be trash, yes, but we should expect feminist fiction to do more than simply point that out. Beyond men’s badness lie more interesting second- and third-order questions about the lives of women, about how to be a feminist in the 21st century. A novel that genuinely grapples with those questions might illuminate something not just about the a priori necessity of feminism (a given for most Adichie readers) but also about the thorny process of putting different feminisms into practice. A younger Adichie might have penned just such a novel. What a pity that the new Adichie — the defensive celebrity, the territorial feminist — seems no longer capable of writing such a book.