Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie returns – with a novel that misses the mark

Telegraph

08-03-2025

In December 2011, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie – Nigeria's leading contemporary novelist – published an essay in The Daily Beast about Nafissatou Diallo, the woman who that May had accused the French economist and politician Dominique Strauss-Kahn of assaulting her in the New York hotel where she worked as a housekeeper. Adichie expressed dismay that, because Diallo had been found to have lied about unrelated matters, 'she becomes nothing but a liar' – leading prosecutors to drop the case.
The following year, Adichie was catapulted from literary renown to global celebrity when she gave a TEDx talk titled 'We Should All Be Feminists'. It has been viewed online more than six million times to date, sampled by Beyoncé in her song '***Flawless', quoted on a T-shirt by Dior, and published as a freestanding book, copies of which were at one point being distributed to every 16-year-old schoolchild in Sweden. Her third novel, Americanah (2013), won the National Book Critics' Circle Award in the US and sold more than two million copies worldwide.
In 2017, however, Adichie experienced one of the downsides of 21st-century fame after she declined, during an interview with Channel 4 News, to give an unqualified endorsement of the formula 'trans women are women'. Speaking engagements were cancelled; she faced calls for her literary prizes to be rescinded. The essay that she published in response, 'It Is Obscene', in which she railed against 'ideological orthodoxy', was viewed so many times that her website crashed.
Throughout all this, the situation of Nafissatou Diallo has remained close to her heart. A five-page author's note at the end of Dream Count, Adichie's first novel in 12 years, explains that Diallo was the inspiration for one of the four women whose interlinked stories comprise the plot. Kadiatou, the character in question, is a magnificent creation – downtrodden but spirited, ignorant but intelligent, superstitious but worldly – and her section of the novel is enormously compelling. We're shown her childhood in a remote Guinean village, where she's subjected to FGM and an arranged marriage, the sudden loss of her husband, and her emigration to America with her daughter Binta in search of a better life.
The descriptions of the assault at the hotel and its immediate aftermath are peppered with heart-rending psychological detail. At the hospital, Kadiatou is horrified to learn that she must give up her uniform for evidence. 'She has two sets, but already this feels like a loss, a failure.' Later, when she's given a small bag containing toothpaste, soap and deodorant, she feels embarrassed, 'as if she's being rewarded for her own violation'.
It's hard to say why Adichie felt moved to wrap this potent story up with those of three wealthy, educated Nigerian women in their thirties and forties: Chiamaka, a travel writer for whom Kadiatou cooks and cleans; Chiamaka's friend Zikora, a lawyer; and Omelogor, Chiamaka's cousin, who has a high-flying job in a bank and writes a feminist blog in her spare time. Unlike Kadiatou, these women are global citizens, equally at home in Lagos, London or New York. They're capable of amusing swipes at the sanctimony and provincialism of American intellectuals, but they lack the vivid estrangement of Kadiatou's perspective on Western culture. Instead, their sections are largely structured around the disillusionments of middle age.
Chiamaka and Zikora, in particular, are coming to terms with the withering of their childhood dreams. They wanted to marry and have children, but the men who've come their way over the years haven't been up to much. We're treated to a rogues' gallery: humourless boyfriends, shallow boyfriends, boyfriends made insufferable by success or embittered by failure, boyfriends inordinately proud of their 'inadequate' genitals, boyfriends who neglect to mention that they're already married. These stories do quicken some sympathy, but it's of a different order to that aroused by Kadiatou's plight, and the other characters suffer from the juxtaposition. Perhaps that wouldn't matter if their role in Dream Count was simply to throw hers into relief, but each of the four sections is given equal billing.
A bigger problem is that by endowing Kadiatou with a supportive network of rich, well-connected friends – which her real-life model never had – Adichie dramatically lowers the stakes. The same goes for some of her other departures from the historical record. When the criminal case was dropped, Diallo brought a civil action against Strauss-Kahn – he settled out of court for a rumoured $1.5 million – as well as a separate case against The New York Post, which had alleged that she was a prostitute. Kadiatou, by contrast, is delighted to hear that the charges against her attacker have been dismissed, freeing her from the humiliations of the American legal system, and allowing her to move on with her life. Dream Count concludes on a surprisingly hopeful image: 'Kadiatou and Binta, these two thoroughly decent people, mother and daughter, sitting on a sofa holding hands, their faces bathed in light.' It's strange that a book about disenchantment should end by serving up a fantasy.