What does it mean for a novelist to be brave? Voicing inconvenient truths? Challenging received wisdom? Speaking truth to power – wherever that power may lie? I’ve been reflecting on these questions after reading Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s big, noisy, ambitious new novel, Dream Count.
It’s the Nigerian writer’s first novel in 12 years — the story of four African women on both sides of the Atlantic who are deeply connected yet very different. I’m thrilled to say it’s a cracker — scintillating, funny, deeply humane, and morally courageous too.
What do I mean by that? First, it dares to be angry — about the state of the world, especially for women, and particularly for black women. All the women in the novel, in both Nigeria and America, are disappointed or betrayed by men — some more often and bitterly than others. Adichie will know this leaves her vulnerable to the “angry black woman” trope, but this is an author who became a global icon after delivering her 2012 TED Talk We Should All Be Feminists. She calls it as she sees it.
She has no qualms about depicting misogyny, racism, and injustices within the US legal system. But some of her characters are equally scathing about cancel culture in American universities, and about the way political progressives twist themselves into strange ideological shapes to appear fashionably on “the right side of history.” To be human, Adichie says in her author’s note at the end, “is not, and should not be, an endless procession of virtue.”
It’s a book that pushes back against cultural censorship and reductive discourse — and it feels exhilarating. It might just clear the air for writers of all political persuasions (and none) to say what they really think.
The beauty of a novel lies in its ability to contain many sides of a debate, holding them in dynamic opposition — and it’s usually a mistake to assume any one character voices the author’s true beliefs. And yet, the complex, often flawed women in Dream Count are clearly born from Adichie’s own experiences. They form, refreshingly, an unruly chorus of discord and dissonance.
And how about these other brave reads?
The Nix by Nathan Hill (2016)
I can’t mention Nathan Hill’s Wellness yet again in this newsletter — so I’ll change the record and recommend his first novel, The Nix. It’s big — full of life, characters, ideas, wit, and warmth. It jumps back and forth in time, following an English professor lost in life. His mother abandoned him as a child, but when she reappears in public consciousness (after assaulting a politician and being labelled a “radical hippie prostitute teacher”), we uncover her past as a leftie activist in the 1960s.
This gives us two parallel coming-of-age-in-America storylines, complete with brilliant (tragicomic) set pieces. One standout sequence centres on a character’s videogame obsession, where the Elfscape player Pwnage becomes a textbook example of why excessive time in the virtual world might not be great for your health. It’s a baggy, ambitious monster of a book.
Any Human Heart by William Boyd (2002)
William Boyd writes with real ambition — why not try to capture the cultural life of the entire 20th century through the diaries of an imaginary man? Any Human Heart follows Logan Mountstuart across the century, crossing paths with famous names and moments in history.
Logan is recruited by Ian Fleming to keep an eye on the Duke of Windsor during the war. He parties with the art crowd and Jackson Pollock, brushes up against the Baader-Meinhof terrorists — and somewhere along the way, he lives a messy, fascinating life. Sex! Art! Politics! Money! Espionage! Property! All human life is here.
The Bee Sting by Paul Murray (2023)
Dickie and Imelda Barnes have it all: a booming car sales business, an overflowing wardrobe, and two mostly well-adjusted kids — teenage Cass and 12-year-old PJ. Then it all starts to unravel.
Dickie falls into terrifying debt, Imelda lists everything on eBay, PJ makes some troubling online friends, and Cass will do anything to impress her mean-girl best friend Elaine (and escape the whole mess for Dublin). Oh, and there’s some apocalypse prepping thrown in too.
Paul Murray’s sprawling Irish family saga is riotous, darkly funny, and (in my opinion) deserved to win the Booker.
The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt (2013)
Thirteen-year-old Theo Decker is visiting the Met Museum in New York with his mother when a terrorist bomb explodes — killing her and leaving him clutching a priceless painting, Carel Fabritius’s The Goldfinch.
The painting becomes the magnetic centre of this sweeping novel, pulling characters into its orbit and putting Theo in danger as he grows up with this terrible secret.
The Goldfinch doesn’t have the condensed brilliance of Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, but its loose brushstrokes and vast canvas — spanning New York, Las Vegas, London, and Amsterdam — have their own peculiar charm.
“Caring too much for objects can destroy you. Only — if you care for a thing enough, it takes on a life of its own, doesn’t it? And isn’t the whole point of things — beautiful things — that they connect you to some larger beauty?”
A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan (2010)
Jennifer Egan’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel makes a virtue of being all over the place. It leaps from 1970s Kenya to 2020s New York (as imagined by Egan), stopping off in Italy and San Francisco along the way.
This collage of interconnected stories centres on the music business and features a colourful cast, including a washed-up rock star, a bipolar journalist, and a genocidal dictator.
It plays with form too — one chapter is written as a PowerPoint presentation (cutting edge back in 2010), and another unfolds as a disastrous interview with a teenage actress. Oh, and there’s also a band called The Flaming Dildos.
The Sparsholt Affair by Alan Hollinghurst (2017)
Alan Hollinghurst’s sixth novel isn’t exactly noisy, but it’s big, ambitious, and spans decades with an ensemble cast.
We begin at Oxford University in 1940, where several students develop a collective infatuation with David Sparsholt, a strikingly handsome 17-year-old with “a glorious head, like a Roman gladiator.”
More than 20 years later, we meet David’s son, Johnny, on a family holiday — lusting after his French exchange partner, Bastien. Between these time shifts, David becomes embroiled in a corruption scandal, which shadows Johnny’s life as he forges a career as a celebrated portrait painter.
One of the great pleasures of this rich, wistful novel is piecing together what happened in the gaps between sections.