Review: Americanah - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Title: Americanah

Author: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Summary: Americanah tells the story of Ifemelu and Obinze, two young, academically talented Nigerians who fall in love but get separated by their journey to the West. Ifemelu attends college in America, ends up staying for fifteen years, and becomes a successful blogger, while Obinze tries his luck in the UK and eventually back in Nigeria.

Rating: ★★★★☆

Review:

If you've been on the internet for a few years and haven't come across Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, I'd be surprised. She is famed for her brilliant 'We Should All Be Feminists' TEDx Talk, which was sampled in Beyonce's Flawless. I had heard about Americanah long before I got my hands on a copy, with praise centred on its observations about race, identity, class, and gender. So - did it live up to the hype?

Short answer: Almost.

Long answer: This is a great book. I learnt a huge amount about race, migration, and the experience of Nigerians in America.

Full disclosure: I am a white British woman who has always lived in majority white areas, and I confess that the experiences of Africans moving to the USA or UK is not something I had ever thought about in detail. I picked Americanah as part of a conscious effort to diversify my reading list and learn something about race, and it definitely fulfilled this aim.

The book deals a lot with the differing experiences of 'American and non-American blacks' (as Ifemelu dubs the two groups in her blog) and I found these sections particularly engaging. The conflicts and divergence of beliefs between the two sides hooked me and challenged me to think about how both race and nationality can form a huge part of a person's identity.

I enjoyed that Adichie didn't shy away from down-to-earth realistic descriptions of everything from awkward social interactions and hair relaxing distasters to ingrown hairs and sex (both great and terrible). It was refreshing to not have a female character in any way sanitised and sexualised for the comfort of the reader.

So, what kept this from being a five-star review?

Unlike some commenters, I didn't feel that the novel was overly essay-like or lacking plot in favour of opinion pieces on race, but I did feel that the pace slowed towards the end and the characters became rather passive instead of propelling the action - it became more a story about what they weren't doing than what they were.

A significant portion of the book was devoted to Ifemelu's relationships with her romantic partners. Her ties to Obinze are a constant throughout the book, but Ifem also has relationships with Curt (a white American) and Blaine (a black American). Although it was certainly interesting to examine the dynamic between the race-related experiences of each couple, my main takeaway from the relationships ended up as... men are kind of useless. Each male character seemed to embody a different kind of microaggression, from exotification to mansplaining and body-shaming, and it was frustrating to watch Ifemelu stay with these partners despite their flaws. Obviously all relationships involve an element of compromise, and the reader is reminded that Ifem stays because she 'loves' them, but Adichie sometimes spent so long describing Curt and Blaine's flaws that it was difficult to see what there was to love.

Adichie gave us a lot more time with Ifemelu than with Obinze, which made it a little difficult to get fully invested in their relationship. I was more engaged with the parts of the book dealing with Ifemelu's observations on race and blackness than the will-they-won't-they romance. The reader is kept in suspense until the very last sentence and I was definitely keen to see whether they ended up together, but I feel that was more about me wanting Ifem to make any decision one way or the other after almost 500 pages of waiting!

A small but necessary aside: the least realistic and most frustrating part of the book was definitely the success of Ifemelu's blog. Although the premise of her being a successful blogger didn't bother me, I cringed at descriptions of her uploading the first post to a newly created blog and receiving a stream of comments within the first few hours. Where is she advertising this blog? Does she have magic go-viral superpowers? This is a small issue really, but it jarred so much with the unfiltered, realistic tone of the rest of the novel that I couldn't not mention it.

Ifemelu seems dissatisfied with a lot of things in her life - understandably so in most instances. She misses Nigeria and she misses Obinze. As I progressed through the novel and she moved back to Nigeria, I expected her tone and mood to shift - not necessarily to become immediately happy and fulfilled (fifteen years away from your home is a long time), but I found myself hoping to be blown away by some moment of triumph or resolution at the end of the book to reassure me that Ifem made the right decision to move back. This never quite happened. Ifem didn't seem to be much happier after moving back than she was in America, so was the implication that her happiness depended on Obinze? Or that migration and mixed national identity will always leave a person dissatisfied and struggling to settle in their life? 

I don't have the answer, but I feel as though the book was aiming to provide one and ultimately didn't quite get there; a more definite concluding message might have edged this from a 4 stars to 5. It was an engaging and educational read, but its overarching message seemed to get a bit lost over the second half.

Have you read Americanah, or are you planning to? Let me know what you think!

Katy xo