March Book Report: Americanah

I had listened to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s TED talks, heard interviews with her on NPR, and was otherwise aware of her work before I picked up Americanah.  I finally read the novel in preparation for a faculty book group meeting next month.  I figured that I would like it but despite my familiarity and enjoyment of Adichie’s ideas and other works, I wasn’t at all prepared for the brilliance of this book, which I absorbed and keep thinking about.

It is indeed brilliant, with both the hard shine of cogent social and political criticism of the United States, England, and Nigeria, and the radiant humor and joy of life that the both the author-narrator and her primary characters demonstrate.  I loved this book.

The opening scenes of the novel happen in New Jersey, as the center of the story,  Ifemelu, makes the short journey from the mostly white, liberal, privileged enclave of Princeton to Trenton, where she travels to have her hair braided.  It’s just 13 miles away but rather a world apart and the juxtaposition serves as the central contrast in the novel.  The book is one-part story and one-part conversation about race and ethnicity in America and England as compared to life in Nigeria, where Ifemelu grew up aware of being Nigerian but not aware of having a race. 

Her arrival and 15 year experience in the United States makes Ifemelu aware of race and identity in a whole new way.  The experience is both alienating and informative and Adichie’s reflections here are both uncomfortable and absorbing.   The reader also sees England through the eyes of Obinze, Ifemelu’s high school boyfriend, also an immigrant in a new place finding his way through racial and class confusion.

Though the criticisms are sticking and real, Adichie also shows her affection for these places that make up her characters’ worlds and also her own.  As the author and observer, she seems to move easily between these places, even while Ifemelu and Obinze struggle to do the same.  Adichie understands their journey and it shows.  I loved this book for both the story at the heart of it and the often biting but always thoughtful criticism that ran throughout.  That’s the essential talent of Adichie’s writing: the ability to ask the reader to critically examine her nation without being cruel or hopeless in that lens.  This book has lingered with me long past my reading of the last lines.  I look forward to reading it again and again, the highest complement I can pay a book.