Dream Count by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie review – a tale of four women | Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

‘Novels had always felt to me truer than what was real,” declares a character in Dream Count, the highly anticipated new novel by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. It is a statement echoed in the accompanying author’s note, which contends that the “point of art is to look at our world and be moved by it, and then to engage in a series of attempts at clearly seeing that world, interpreting it, questioning it”. Since the publication of her extraordinarily assured debut novel, Purple Hibiscus, in 2003, Adichie’s fiction has performed this task of seeing, interpreting and questioning to huge acclaim, garnering her major awards as well as a public profile far beyond most writers, whose work hasn’t been sampled by Beyoncé.

In keeping with her superstar status, Dream Count is billed as “a publishing event 10 years in the making” and is perhaps the surest bet so far for this year’s Women’s prize. However, its publication is also accompanied by difficult personal circumstances: Adichie’s father died in June 2020, followed in March 2021, less than a year later, by the death of her mother, after which, as she writes in the author’s note, her “life’s cover was ripped off”. Having already written about her father’s death in her extended essay Notes on Grief, Dream Count, Adichie asserts, is “really about my mother”. Composed of the interlocking stories of four women, Chiamaka (“Chia”), Zikora, Omelogor and Kadiatou, it is also quintessential Adichie: ambitious, astute and powered by an accumulation of feather-light sentences that build to devastating weight.

The women are immigrants in the US. Chia, a travel writer, Zikora, a lawyer, and Omelogor, a former banker turned grad student, are Nigerian; Kadiatou, a hotel maid, is Guinean. Chia’s first-person narration establishes the novel’s melancholic tone: “I have always longed to be known,” she declares in the opening line, “truly known, by another human being.” Driven to reminiscing about past lovers during the Covid lockdowns, she passes her time “grieving 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 truly known me”. Her story gives way to Zikora’s, who is desperately trying to track down the boyfriend who abandoned her following a surprise pregnancy and whose own story morphs, with a sting of surprising sweetness, into a paean to the pull of motherhood. The narrative is then riven by the tragedy of Kadiatou’s story before being overtaken by Omelogor’s musings about her dissolute lifestyle in Abuja prior to quitting her high-flying career to undertake postgraduate research on pornography.

Dream Count’s deepest pleasures come from the way Adichie privileges the women’s status as outsiders, and therefore observers, whether of American culture (Kadiatou remarks, for example, that American cops wear tight clothing because “they don’t run, American police, they shoot more than they run”), or of heterosexual relations (Omelogor starts a blog called For Men Only, which delivers such deliciously wry barbs as: “Dear men, I understand that you don’t like abortion but the best way to reduce abortion is to watch where your male bodily fluids go”). In this sense, as well as the fact that it is permeated by preoccupations that a lesser writer would have marshalled into a conventional marriage plot – Chia’s desire for romantic love, Zikora’s feverish need to get her ex back; even the fiercely independent Omelogor’s “truest longing” is “for marriage” – the book is directly reminiscent of Adichie’s previous novel, Americanah.

However, such is the nature of Adichie’s masterly sentences, clear as polished windowpanes, that one has no choice but to look more closely, and to see that what these women pine for is always out of reach. The real action occurs in the sealed tunnel of memory, in characters speaking to each other from computer screens during lockdown, or, in Kadiatou’s case – as her dreams are brought crashing down by an incident that mirrors the accusations made in 2011 against Dominique Strauss-Kahn – in the locked luxury hotel room where she endures every woman’s nightmare. In circling this incident, the novel turns away from the possibility of romantic love even as it returns again and again – with increasing cynicism – to its pressing central question: is it possible to be truly known by another human being? Kadiatou’s account is misunderstood and misinterpreted by the authorities and the media, even the people whose official role is to be on her side; it is flattened by the sense that they have “heard this story many times, in different forms, from all kinds of women, but in the end the same story”. It is not the same story, and that is the point. Adichie’s careful way of seeing turns up tiny, awful, distinguishing details; how “even in her shock [Kadiatou] was afraid to hurt him”, how her overriding concern afterwards is whether she still has a job to go to, how she wishes she’d had time to collect herself, to not report what had happened, so “all would be normal now”.

This novel is ultimately wider-ranging than Americanah, with a collage of womanhood assembled around this incident, but threading together childbirth and pregnancy loss, abortions and hysterectomies, fibroids and female genital mutilation, sexual assault and sexual harassment, as if nothing less than the whole of female experience is within its scope. Yet at the same time it is painfully introspective, not only because it is set against the backdrop of the Covid pandemic, a built-in reminder of “how breakable we all are”, but also because it includes many moments – such as when, pondering one of her breakups, Chia muses about “how quickly mystery dissolves to dust” – in which one senses the subliminal gesture towards deeper traumas, the feeling of unbearable confinement alongside floating alienation, the hermetic numbness with which many of us experience grief.

Or perhaps I was nudged towards this feeling by Adichie suggesting that her late mother would have recognised Kadiatou as her “fellow woman”. I can’t remember when I last found an author’s note so deeply moving, suggesting as it does that one possible answer to the novel’s central question lies in its loving attention to the relationships between its central female characters, in its assessment of the power of female solidarity, which is as close as many of us will ever come to being known.