Review: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s ‘Dream Count’ tracks crucial moments in four lives

Twelve years ago, Nigerian American writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie published her third novel, “Americanah,” which cemented her reputation as an international literary star.

Since then, she has published an epistolary book on feminism, a delightful children’s book and a number of shorter pieces, perhaps the most memorable of them dealing with her profound grief after her father’s death. But there’s a new novel, finally.

In the intervening years #MeToo, the COVID-19 pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movement all gained momentum. It should come as no surprise, then, that Adichie’s new novel, “Dream Count,” is brimming with identifiable themes, with her usual playfulness and percipience primed and in full swing.

Unlike Adichie’s first three novels, mostly plotted along conventional lines, “Dream Count” is a collection of four linked stories, each devoted to a different female character. They’re connected, somewhat loosely at first glance, by personal interaction and circumstance.

In Maryland, Chiamaka, beautiful, rich and a hopeless romantic, goes first and last. Her story establishes the novel’s timeline (pandemic-ish?) and introduces the other characters, Zikora, Kadiatou and Omelogor, whose lives will come into sharper focus later.

Armed with the dream of becoming a Nigerian travel writer (cue the #travelingwhileblack hashtag) and with an American boyfriend who is dismissive and pretentiously liberal-minded, Chiamaka is a walking commentary on our current preoccupation with travel and leftist politics. Here, Adichie is amusing us while mocking her characters. But she also is exasperated by many matters at hand, as zingers fly left and right, making for some awkward encounters.

Chiamaka’s story revolves around men and desire. It’s who she dates and has dated, who she has broken up with and why, and ultimately, what it means that, at 44, she remains unmarried and childless. (This might be one way to interpret the book’s title, as well as its subtler theme of motherhood.)

Zikora’s story follows her close friend Chiamaka’s. Zikora is a successful Nigerian lawyer in Washington D.C. Her engrossing section opens, hot and traumatic, in a delivery room, with her mother sitting coolly by her side. Zikora, too, is unmarried and the father of her child has disappeared. Where does she go from here? For both Zikora and Chiamaka, the odds of fulfillment, at least in romance and love, seem slim.

No other character in the novel is more vulnerable — or more exquisitely rendered — than Kadiatou. Born to a loving family in Guinea, West Africa, she suffers one loss after another until, by the miraculous stroke of a pen, she and her daughter are granted asylum in America.

Her life is upended, though, when she is assaulted by a VIP guest at a Washington D.C. hotel, where she works as a maid. Caught in a whirlpool of media assaults and incredulous claims, she fights to come up for air while the other characters rally to help her.

Omelogor is Chiamaka’s cousin and every corrupt Nigerian man’s nightmare. An independent banker living mainly in Abuja, she is cerebral, bold and not afraid to go against the grain.

In the end, all these women’s lives are intertwined and shaped, try as they might to escape them, by the options that society offers or doesn’t offer.

This is hardly new feminist ground for Adichie. But in “Dream Count,” she ups the ante slowly with intense, brilliant care — the needle moving forward an inch or two and giving us reason to believe in a better future.

Angela Ajayi is a critic and writer who lives in Minneapolis.

Dream Count

By: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.

Publisher: Knopf, 400 pages, $32.