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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Frustrating Return
Her new novel Dream Count suffers from the retrograde gender politics and bad writing that has defined her career of late.
There’s Chiamaka, a hopeless-romantic travel writer who yearns for a soulmate; Zikora, an ambitious lawyer who wants to have both a high-powered career and a picture-perfect family; Kadiatou, a long-suffering maid who seeks opportunity in America; and Omelogor, a depressed graduate student who craves intellectual freedom. At best, the book presents a Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus picture of gender relations; at worst, it is a blandly regressive take on progressive Americans, who, in these pages, are two-dimensional caricatures sketched from conservative talking points rather than the fully formed characters one expects to encounter in literary fiction. Three of the protagonists — Chiamaka, the travel writer; Zikora, the lawyer; and Omelogor, the banker turned grad student — hold similar views about money (there’s nothing wrong with being wealthy, especially if you’re a woman), sex (gentle and knowing is good; rough and anonymous is bad), and, most of all, men (they’re trash!).
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