Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, _Dream Count_

DREAM COUNT KEPT reminding me of Sex and the City, in that we have four women characters experiencing the vicissitudes of family, career, sex, and life in general in the contemporary city (Washington, D. C., for the greater part). All four are originally from Africa (three from Nigeria, one from Ghana), three now live in the USA. Or maybe Dream Count is more like Designing Women, if you remember that one, in that one of the women is working class.

Chiamaka is the hub character; the other three have closer relations to her than they do to each other. An aspiring travel writer from a wealthy family, she has “always longed to be known, truly known by another human being,” as she tells us in the novel’s first sentence. Her family badly wants her to marry and have children, but each of the men with whom she gets involved turns out to be not quite what she is looking for.

Zikora is Chiamaka’s best friend, a successful professional but under the same family pressure to marry and have children. She gets pregnant and believes her seemingly deeply committed boyfriend will be ready for the next level, but whoops, no, he isn’t, and he vanishes like a puff of smoke.

Kadiatou, who grew up in a village and does not have the formal education  the other three have, is Chiamaka’s sometime housekeeper who also works as a hotel maid. In the course of her work she endures an assault like that of which Dominique Strauss-Kahn was accused, turning her and her daughter’s life upside down as she finds herself under punishing media scrutiny. Chiamaka helps organize support for her.

Omelogor is Chiamaka’s cousin, a successful professional in Nigeria, whose main work seems to involve laundering money for heavyweight Nigerian politicians. She has also gotten a doctorate in cultural studies in the USA  and has a popular blog called “For Men Only.”

Dream Count does not have a strong central plot, but it does have a strong central theme: epistemology. What do we know, how do we know it, how do we know we know? Chiamaka wants to be known, but no man so far really knows her. Zikora thought she knew her boyfriend, but was way wrong. Kadiatou has to fight her way through assumptions about who she is and who the man who attacked her is—much or most of the world thinks it knows her, assumes she is lying, or a prostitute, and so on, and are dead wrong. Omelogor’s blog is all about what men ought to know but don’t, and her dissertation is about the problem that much of men’s “knowledge” of female sexuality comes from pornography, which is based more on male fantasy than on anything else.

I would have to say of the four Adichie novels I have read (Purple Hibiscus, Half of a Yellow Sun, and Americanah), this is the one I enjoyed least…I did enjoy it, though. All four women are vividly presented, the sentences brisk, Adichie’s eye for revealing detail sharp. But a bit like Sex and the City, it’s entertaining without being thought-provoking.