On March 4, more than a decade after her previous novel Americanah, Hopkins alum Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie gave the people what they wanted: Dream Count. This recent addition to her body of works is a nebulous story following the lives of four African women navigating the U.S., pinned together in the middle with a disconcertingly familiar case of sexual assault perpetrated against one of the women.
The quartet of women are as follows: Chiamaka “Chia” — a travel writer whose beauty and wealth overwater her character, forcing her greatest fear of never being truly known to come true; Zikora — a lawyer foundering to maintain a semblance of composure when her son’s father left before he was even born; Kadiatou — a maid thrust into the blistering spotlight after she is assaulted by a foreign dignitary; and Omelogor — a Robin-Hood banker who reversed the flow of dirty money in favor of the poor before studying pornography as men’s sexual education at an American graduate school.
The novel begins on a weak foot. Contemporary readers (speaking for myself at least) may buck at reading stories that plant their roots in the COVID-19 pandemic, as Dream Count does. Readers’ experiences with these stories parallel the responses to premature jokes after tragedies: too soon.
While its roots may be in the pandemic, the novel has a hard time otherwise mooring itself. As it prioritizes weaving discrete perspectives together, sense of time takes a seat on the back burner, giving the reader an impression of a story with no plot backbone. However, like overlooking bad first impressions with not-so-fast friends, staying mad at Dream Count is hard to do for long.
Just like an Ancient Greek sculptor, Adichie is a master at making a human. While her skill can be seen microscopically in the mundane or trifling — being allergic to a partner’s beard oil, the faux pas of ordering a mimosa at a fancier restaurant — it is impossible to not marvel at when stretched to fit over an entire character. Chia may be exorbitantly wealthy and beautiful, but these privileges are balanced with her frenetic desire to be known and her penchant for men that will give her everything but, sapping her wealth and time in the process. All this considered, one may instead prefer to be more like Kadiatou: poor and wronged but earnestly insisting that she is wealthy enough and has been given more blessings than trials.
As we have been conditioned to believe since high school, with summer reading from The Great Gatsby to Of Mice and Men, writers seem as drawn to tragedy as bathwater to a drain. However, even in a novel with its beginning and end similarly drenched in reference to the COVID-19 pandemic, Dream Count manages to stick the landing like an injured gymnast: smiling and woundedly hopeful. Kadiatou’s cutthroat court case that led her to be called her a liar regarding the assault was ultimately dropped. While Chia, bearing the brunt of disseminating this news, anticipates a negative reaction, she finds herself surprised to see Kadiatou smile — she had been praying for it to never happen.
In the Author’s Note, Adichie describes Dream Count as a “gesture of returned dignity.” From this progenitor of intentions, the story slips in and out of hardships like dresses you keep the tags on and wear for one night only: to be returned, exchanged for Adichie’s store-credit dignity, the best that anyone can offer. The novel ends with Kadiatou and her daughter embracing at the news of the trial falling through, “their faces bathed in light.” Reading Dream Count is an exercise in returning dignity by merely being there. In the context of a story, “being there” translates to reading it, thus communicating to the survivor that they are still being heard regardless of the verdict.
Adichie seeks to prove the truth by observing the efficacy of small platitudes in extreme cases, as if testing so-advertised “indestructible” children’s toys with a trial of gunshots. In Dream Count, she tries the sentiment the best you can do is simply be there. In the end, it rings true.
