In a 1973 essay called “Approaches to What?,” the French writer Georges Perec coined an excellent word: endotic.
The opposite of exotic, it refers to anything so familiar that we fail
to register it—paper towels, say, or the kinds of beds we sleep in, or
the fact that, unto others, we have accents. Generally speaking, only
outsiders notice these particulars, which produces something of a
paradox: Those who are least at home in a culture often perceive it
best.
That outsider acuity is both the subject and the method of Americanah, a new novel by Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. It is her third, after the 2003 coming-of-age story Purple Hibiscus and the 2006 Half of a Yellow Sun,
about life during the Biafran War. Both books are excellent—the first
won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, the second the Orange Prize—as is
her 2009 short-story collection, The Thing Around Your Neck. But Americanah,
which does us the great if uncomfortable favor of exposing parts of our
culture many of us fail to see for ourselves, is a work of a different
order.
I use that phrase deliberately: With this new book, Adiche has scaled up. Americanah traverses
three genres (romance, comedy of manners, novel of ideas), three
nations (Nigeria, Great Britain, the United States), and, within each, a
swath of the social spectrum as broad—and as difficult to nail—as the
hand spans in a Rachmaninoff concerto. It is a book about identity,
nationality, race, difference, loneliness, aspiration, and love, not as
distinct entities but in the complex combinatorial relations they
possess in real life.
The book opens in Princeton, a town so pristine it actually
sounds that way. Immediately, though, it swerves south, to Trenton, the
closest place where its protagonist, Ifemelu, can get her hair braided.
That’s a long way to go for a hairdo, but it’s nothing compared to how
long braiding can take—in this case, 365 pages. Adichie is hardly the
first person to use hair to show how the personal and political become,
so to speak, entangled; see Audre Lorde, bell hooks, Chris Rock—or,
heck, Hair. Still, her version is clever. Adichie, too, is
braiding and weaving, and the longer she leaves Ifemelu in that
dilapidated, overheated salon, the more clearly the strands of her story
emerge.
That story begins nearly twenty years earlier, in Nigeria, when
the teenage Ifemelu and a boy named Obinze fall in love. They are
bright, motivated, and earnest—which is to say, everything the Nigerian
state is not. Surrounded by corruption and dysfunction, they eventually
respond, as many members of their real-life generation did, by leaving.
Ifemelu goes to the United States. Obinze, rejected by America’s
post-9/11 gatekeepers, heads to England, on a tourist visa he soon
overstays. Eventually he is discovered and sent back to Nigeria, where
he begins an ascent that culminates in a fancy house, a wife and
daughter, and a distant, viscous, alienated boredom. Meanwhile, in
America, Ifemelu finds herself surviving through work so humiliating
that she cuts off all communication with Obinze—and, effectively, with
herself. Gradually, though, her life swings upward as well. She launches
a blog about race in America, earns readers and speaking fees, buys a
condo, and begins dating a handsome, conscientious Yale professor. Yet
by the time we meet her in that salon, she has decided to trade all this
for a one-way ticket back to Nigeria.
Much of what keeps the arc of this book taut, then, is the
question of whether Ifemelu and Obinze will reunite, and on what terms.
But on top of that most familiar of all narrative scaffoldings, a love
story, Adichie builds an altogether different tale: one about all the
ways we humans fail to love each other—and one that, in the end, isn’t
familiar after all.
“This is America. You’re supposed to pretend
that you don’t notice certain things.” That’s how a friend explains to
the newly arrived Ifemelu the curious behavior of a cashier in a
clothing store—who, in asking which of two salespeople helped her,
attempts to distinguish between them on every imaginable basis except
the obvious one: skin color.
Pretending not to notice certain things about America is exactly
what Adichie refuses to do in this book. On the contrary, she notices
nearly everything, from how we socialize to what we eat to what we say. (Endotic also refers to the inner ear, and Adichie has a keen one. The two words she identifies as most distinctively American are trouper and blowhard.)
Most of all, though, she notices how race works. Some of those
observations are recorded in Ifemelu’s blog, which includes posts on the
phrase oppression olympics, for instance, and on dreadlocked
white guys who dismiss racism as “totally overhyped.” But her more
successful observations emerge through the interactions between
characters. Adichie is uncommonly sensitive to the space between people,
the way it ripples with all kinds of invisible forces: physical beauty,
economic discrepancy, sexual attraction, intellectual appraisal, guilt,
resentment, envy, need. In America, she recognizes, the most potent of
all the invisible strings—the strong nuclear force of our social
physics—is race.
Adichie’s analysis of that force is specific, damning,
clarifying, and comprehensive. She is merciless about white liberal
attitudes toward race, with their prevailing mix of awkward
self-consciousness, contented ignorance, self-satisfaction, and
submerged fear. (White women gush to their nannies about the “rich
culture” of Africa; white party guests hasten to tell Nigerians about
their charity work in Malawi.) But she is equally caustic about everyone
else’s anxious racial jostling: black immigrants toward
African-Americans, Caribbean immigrants toward Africans, Senegalese
toward Nigerians, Nigerians who went abroad toward those who stayed
behind, Nigerians who stayed behind toward “Americanahs”—local slang for
those who return home after a stint in the United States.
This cataloguing sometimes goes awry, as do other parts of the
book. Adichie is never less than astute about racism, but her treatment
of it can blur the line between fiction and op-ed. She is an excellent
raconteur, but some threads of this story escape her—notably, one about
Ifemelu’s cousin, who suffers an incident too serious for its slim
handling. Obinze feels fully human, but Ifemelu is mostly a voice, and
one that sometimes slips from character to author.
I was also somewhat troubled by Americanah’s ambient temperature. Half of a Yellow Sun,
a book about atrocities, overflows with love; its characters are
inclined by kindness, and forced by war, to transcend both the narrow
fissures of private difference and the broad fissures of nationality and
class. By contrast, this new book, about lesser atrocities, is cool and
withholding. Only Ifemelu and Obinze fully love and forgive each other.
(Very fully. Adichie writes great sex scenes: specific, private, hot,
tender—so convincing you could slide your hand under their shirt.) That
reflects a reality, of course: We sometimes love most those to whom we
don’t need to explain ourselves. But I missed the warmth of the earlier
novel, and I felt uneasy about what its absence implies about the limits
of empathy and the intransigence of difference.
Still, none of this trumps my admiration for Adichie’s grasp of
social dynamics, and her precision and fearlessness in committing them
to the page. Midway through her cultural anatomy lesson, I found myself
laughing—ruefully, from recognizing myself and my country, but also
delightedly, from recognizing an echo of a familiar voice. In Americanah,
Adichie is to blackness what Philip Roth is to Jewishness: its most
obsessive taxonomist, its staunchest defender, and its fiercest critic.
Roth’s transformational imaginative act was to reinvent the
marginal Jew as an American Everyman, even while refusing to downplay
the specificity of Jewishness. Adichie does him one better. From The Namesake to The Joy Luck Club to Pnin,
stories of immigrants adjusting to the United States are as central to
American literature as they are to the American Dream. But Americanah,
which seems in some ways like that kind of story, surprises us: Its arc
is one of return. In the end, Ifemelu goes back to Nigeria, not because
she didn’t succeed in America, not because of any crisis back home, but
simply because she wants to. Roth challenged the identity of the hero.
Adichie challenges the end point of the journey.
That makes Americanah a new kind of migration story, one
that reflects a political shift and suggests a literary one. It’s one of
the better novels I’ve read about life in contemporary America, but I’m
not tempted to call it a Great American Novel. Instead, it strikes me
as an early, imperfect, admirable stab at something new: a Great Global
Novel. Ifemelu was well on her way to becoming an American—that promise
dangled before, and coveted by, so much of the world for so long. She
chooses, instead, to become an Americanah: an identity predicated on
experience rather than nationality, trajectory rather than place. It’s
an open question whether identities like that will change the world for
the better. But, in Adichie, they have already done so for literature.
Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Alfred A. Knopf.
AS
the nation marked 14 years of uninterrupted democracy, Nigerians have
been advised to take responsibility for their health by shunning
unhealthy diets and lifestyles in order to produce a productive
workforce for the country.
