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A review by gadicohen93
Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
3.0
At what point did my feelings about this book start declining, from a near-5 to about a 3?
Perhaps when I got sick of the way Ifem and Obinze judged people, looked at people, the way they could know everything about a person just by looking at them and never returned to edit their impressions, the way they thought other characters “would always” do something, as if people were simply bags of personality traits and ideologies, robots programmed from an early age to do everything the writer’s asked them to, rather than flesh-and-blood human beings with doubts and intuitions and actions taken unsystematically. (That is not to say that I wasn’t captured by Adichie’s characters; their insecurities seemed real, their motives clear, their interactions with other characters fraught with gears turning under the metal.) In a novel whose strongest points were characters being shot down for making grand generalizations and stereotypes and unrequited racial sweeps, this veneer of complexity (which became apparent to me only about halfway through) disturbed me.
Perhaps it was when I realized what a telenovela this book had become. At first, I swooned over its ambition; it was going to be 500 pages of honing in on race, on the immigrant experience, on a trans-Atlantic love story... How original, how fascinating! And at many parts, those were the themes and plot movements that really attracted me and fascinated me and kept me reading. But at some point, it overwhelmed me, this ambition. Adichie was trying to make her novel talk about everything. Ifem’s life became a Ferris wheel of men and jobs and friends and events, things coming in and out of her life on their own accord, one following the other – a regular melodrama. Things started seeming slightly arbitrary, unbelievable, which in this book felt like a sort of treason.
Perhaps it was when the writing started feeling stale, unadorned, “lazy” in Blaine’s words – a barely tailored style that seemed to require no additional thought or work than a simple plug and chug of plot and character. 500 pages is a lot to write, and having to think about every word, every sentence uniquely would be an arduous task for any writer. The blog posts, then, were liberating in that way – something different, interesting, believable. Still, overall, lazy.
However, I kept reading. Ifem’s love for Obinze – as well as her affairs with Curt and Blaine – toyed with my romantic side. And Adichie’s treatment of race – the entire framing device of the hair salon, especially – was so honest, so pink and raw, so complex, that I had to read on.
Perhaps when I got sick of the way Ifem and Obinze judged people, looked at people, the way they could know everything about a person just by looking at them and never returned to edit their impressions, the way they thought other characters “would always” do something, as if people were simply bags of personality traits and ideologies, robots programmed from an early age to do everything the writer’s asked them to, rather than flesh-and-blood human beings with doubts and intuitions and actions taken unsystematically. (That is not to say that I wasn’t captured by Adichie’s characters; their insecurities seemed real, their motives clear, their interactions with other characters fraught with gears turning under the metal.) In a novel whose strongest points were characters being shot down for making grand generalizations and stereotypes and unrequited racial sweeps, this veneer of complexity (which became apparent to me only about halfway through) disturbed me.
Perhaps it was when I realized what a telenovela this book had become. At first, I swooned over its ambition; it was going to be 500 pages of honing in on race, on the immigrant experience, on a trans-Atlantic love story... How original, how fascinating! And at many parts, those were the themes and plot movements that really attracted me and fascinated me and kept me reading. But at some point, it overwhelmed me, this ambition. Adichie was trying to make her novel talk about everything. Ifem’s life became a Ferris wheel of men and jobs and friends and events, things coming in and out of her life on their own accord, one following the other – a regular melodrama. Things started seeming slightly arbitrary, unbelievable, which in this book felt like a sort of treason.
Perhaps it was when the writing started feeling stale, unadorned, “lazy” in Blaine’s words – a barely tailored style that seemed to require no additional thought or work than a simple plug and chug of plot and character. 500 pages is a lot to write, and having to think about every word, every sentence uniquely would be an arduous task for any writer. The blog posts, then, were liberating in that way – something different, interesting, believable. Still, overall, lazy.
However, I kept reading. Ifem’s love for Obinze – as well as her affairs with Curt and Blaine – toyed with my romantic side. And Adichie’s treatment of race – the entire framing device of the hair salon, especially – was so honest, so pink and raw, so complex, that I had to read on.