Americanah

#1099
Title: Americanah
Author: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Year: 2013
Publisher: Knopf
Pages: 477

I liked Half of a Yellow Sun, where I felt a lot of empathy for the characters. Not so this novel, which has a tremendous Mary Sue flavor, which I don't mind much, and a sweeping cast of unpleasant and superficial characters, which does. I kept waiting for the protagonist to become aware that everyone around her, not just white women, was racist and made assumptions, requiring her to rethink her own relationship to race issues; or that she herself was judgmental and interpersonally unpleasant, or that she herself was responsible for the destruction of a certain number of relationships. Nope. None of that happens. Instead, we close with a purportedly romantic ending in which she is about to destroy the only decent character in this long, pointless novel. What I take from this is that Ifemelu has undiagnosed borderline personality disorder. Steer clear of her. She is dangerous. Yet to hint at this in the world of this novel (and, I expect, the world of book reviewing), is to be seen as racist. Let me be very clear: Ifemelu's views on race and race relations, many of which I share, are not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about her depiction as a nasty, passive-aggressive, self-absorbed person.

Goodreads reviewer  Emma Deplores Goodreads Censorship, whose longer review at https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/15796700-americanah is well worth reading, sums it up better than I can:

"And perhaps because Ifemelu's primary role is as an observer who blogs about other people's foibles (actual blog entries are scattered liberally throughout), she mostly comes across as self-righteous and judgmental. When she does act, it's usually to be unpleasant: she passive-aggressively starts fights with her boyfriends, writes personal blog posts about friends without their permission, and when a co-worker criticizes her behavior, her response is to call the co-worker ugly. Ifemelu seems to tolerate other people in her life only insofar as they don't inconvenience her (and she's easily annoyed, by everything from her parents daring to visit her to a boyfriend moving on with his life after she cuts him off), and she radiates disdain for everyone she meets, even those closest to her. Normally I'm a fan of flawed female protagonists, but Ifemelu is neither interesting nor admirable, drifting through a story that seems to take readers' identification with her for granted, with little narrative awareness of her flaws."

It's too bad that this negative and diminishing story has been awarded and optioned for film, while the more nuanced and interesting Half of a Yellow Sun was not. Americanah, which features sometimes insightful but generally nasty blog posts, reads like a nasty blog post. Perhaps that's what makes a producer think people will want to see it, but I won't.

Very disappointing, and enworstened by the audiobook narrator's foul and irritating attempts to voice most of the white women.