Book Review: ‘Dream Count,’ by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

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.