Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie aims to ‘Write a Wrong’ in ‘Dream Count’

In her first novel since “Americanah,” she draws on a real-life assault case as she follows the lives of three Nigerian women and one of their former housekeepers.

“Dream Count,” Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s first novel in a dozen years, is dreamy indeed: an accumulation of scenes and sensations, cloudlike in their contour, floating this way and that against the backdrop of the pandemic that messed up sleep — and time itself — for us all. But embedded a little more than halfway through is a nightmare, a thunderbolt.

A Guinean maid named Kadiatou, a widowed mother to a teenage girl, knocks and enters Suite 2806 of the George Plaza, a luxury hotel in Washington, D.C., and is immediately attacked and orally raped by the naked, silver-haired and paunchy V.I.P. guest within. His semen in her mouth feels like “lingering slithering slimy worms,” and she won’t be able to rinse this horror away until there’s an investigation, which identifies him as a foreign dignitary.

Who can fail to be reminded of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the onetime International Monetary Fund chief and French political hopeful accused of sexual assault in 2011? Yet who remembers the name of his accuser, Nafissatou Diallo, whose criminal suit was dropped after she admitted to fabricating a story of an earlier gang rape, among other complications? America’s justice system demands a clear narrative; its scales are evened with dollar bills. (Diallo’s civil suit was settled for an undisclosed amount, The New York Times reported, and she opened a restaurant in the Bronx.)

The best fiction, and Adichie has produced some of the best fiction of our era, allows readers to consider larger truths than what could be constructed from legal documents and news reports. Basing a character on Diallo, the author asserts in an afterword — giving her deep context, a social network and a hypothetical explanation for a turn in the case never fully explained in the press — allows Adichie “to ‘write’ a wrong in the balance of stories” told about public and private figures, the powerful and the victimized.

She intends this as “a gesture of returned dignity,” and it is a graceful, sweeping one — though when she writes, “I do not know how Nafissatou Diallo felt because I cannot possibly know,” a small voice does want to bleat: “Ask her! Ask her!”

But though Adichie, the closest thing the world has to a literary celebrity (TED Talks, Beyoncé video, viral social-media controversy), has ventured into nonfiction in the years since her novel “Americanah” won the National Book Critics Circle Award, she is not a journalist, but a humanist. Her prose teems and sometime careens with details of daily life: the contrasts small and large between here and overseas.

The cover of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s novel “Dream Count” shows an illustration of a large orange flame with a teardrop of blue at its center.

Like several blockbuster works in modern memory, from “The Joy Luck Club” to Sex and the You-Know-What, “Dream Count” is anchored by four interrelated women. You marvel, in retrospect, that we ever kept track of the eight bopping around Mary McCarthy’s “The Group.”

Kadiatou is the former housekeeper of Chiamaka, a.k.a. Chia, a beautiful travel writer (she’s a fan of Jan Morris) with an anxious attachment style, who Zooms from suburban Maryland to her rich family in Nigeria and London.

Chia’s best friend, and the least integrated into the narrative (perhaps because she’s been imported from an earlier short story), is Zikora, a “burnished successful lawyer” in D.C. who calls the men who have disappointed her — and men have disappointed this entire quartet — “thieves of time.”

Then there is Omelogor, Chia’s closest cousin and a forceful former banker who once sneaked small business grants to women in her Nigerian village, calling the operation “Robyn Hood.” In a head-scratching turn she enrolls in an American graduate school to study pornography as social ill, and dispenses blunt advice on a website called For Men Only. “I understand that you don’t like abortion,” is one truth bomb, “but the best way to reduce abortion is if you take responsibility for where your male bodily fluids go.” She drinks her whiskey neat.

“Dream Count” is innovative in its concentric form, more jotting than plotting, roaming flashbacks, nothing easily resolved. But there’s something faintly old-fashioned about its feminism, the better-off gals gathering to “swim in cocktails.” Men tend to exist on a long sliding scale of badness — from good but boring, to desirable bounders, to sexist C.E.O.s and all the way to outright pillagers. Chia rejects a steady-seeming boyfriend, Chuka, though he’s great in bed, and longs for an emotionally absent, pretentious academic named Darnell, who talks about things like “the reification of the subjective neo-racial paradigm.”

“If only I wrote complicated articles in prestigious journals,” she thinks later — which, LOL.

Adichie’s attention to hierarchies of language, the misuses of jargon, is one of her superpowers, though reading her smack down mealy-mouthed English words like “exploring” and “share,” or even how lunch here is “grabbed” and “enjoyed” rather than simply eaten, can be like watching a tennis star deliver ace after ace: The game is over before it’s started.

Another is her insistence, akin to McCarthy’s, on documenting the reality of women’s bodies: fibroids and premenstrual dysphoric disorder and the under-documented pain of trying to breastfeed and (another thunderbolt) clitoridectomy.

The “dream count” of the title is Chia’s romantic recasting of “body count” — how past affairs, and their unfulfilled potential, linger in thought and emotion — but more broadly an inventory of the hope we all need to go on. “Immigrants are desperate to raise children who think they have a right to dream,” Omelogor thinks, watching Kadiatou being interviewed on American television. “What she needs is an America that understands this.”

You wake up fully to “Dream Count” when it looks at that America with a cocked eye: a place so anxious about toilet paper; a place where the police “shoot more than they run”; a place where maternal mortality statistics are organized jaggedly by race. A place that has, Chia thinks, “bamboozled us all.”

Credit: The New York Times