It’s been 12 years since Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie published her last novel, Americanah, to overwhelming acclaim. In the time since, she’s delivered a viral TED talk on feminism, been sampled by Beyoncé, been denounced by students for anti-trans speech, and denounced those students in turn for cancel culture. Now, at last, Adichie has finally released a new novel: Dream Count.

Sometimes it’s hard to read Dream Count cleanly. It feels as though you have to scrub away the cultural silt that has accumulated over its author’s image to meet the text in good faith. In places, it reads as though Adichie feels the same way. She keeps having her characters go on bitter tangents about the piety and hypocrisy of American liberals, or recite ex-tempore speeches on Feminism 101. (“Dear men, I understand that you don’t like abortion, but the best way to reduce abortion is if you take responsibility for where your male bodily fluids go.”)

In other places, though, Dream Count reminds you of what made Adichie such a phenomenon in the first place: Those precise sentences; that biting satire; all those vivid, complicated women.

Dream Count is built around four Nigerian-born women, all living in or having recently departed from America, in spring 2020 as lockdown descends. Each narrates a section of the novel, the two extroverts in first person and the introverts in third person, as one by one they consider the men in their lives who have loved them and betrayed them.

They’re thinking about their body counts, says one character toward the end of the novel. No, going back over one’s love life is a dream count, returns another.

One craves a deep connection, another a partnership, a third stability; one flourishes on her own but worries that she is missing the chance for something more. All were betrayed by men who at their worst behaved like animals and at their best were simply not enough to build a life around. Instead, as the novel goes on, they find they’ve built their lives around each other.

Dream Count is not a perfect novel, but it offers you the kind of fully textured polyphonic female friendship that only Adichie can render so beautifully and precisely. As we make our way through the end of Women’s History........

© Vox