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Award-winning author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s latest novel “Dream Count” poses the question: How do we grapple with the unknown? Or, to be more specific: How do Nigerian-American immigrant women, unmoored in their 40s, straddling the cultures of the country of their birth and their adoptive one, grapple with the unknown? Set during the COVID-19 pandemic, which disrupted even the most relied-upon habits of daily life, “Dream Count,” Adichie’s first novel in 12 years, brings the women’s struggle with the unknown to a poignant head, resulting in a complex exploration of identity and belonging.

Told from the perspectives of four women, “Dream Count” engrossingly narrates their lives as they alternate between bravely conquering the uncertain — whether it be the pandemic, their identities in foreign countries, their careers, or their love lives — and shrinking in the face of it, insisting that no dignity is lost in the process.

Chiamaka, who hails from a prominent Igbo family, is a travel writer, drawn to the allure of enigmatic cities and men. In her pursuit of the unusual, she seeks out men with “mystery” and obscure places before recoiling at how estranged they are from what she knows. She initially reveres her grating academic lover, Darnell, marveling at his arcane references. Not-so-soon-enough, after a months-long relationship, his condescension makes it impossible for her to ever “feel at home.” Chiamaka is a fascinating and at times frustrating character, a dreamer to a fault.

The irony of her simultaneous desire to explore the uncertain and dwell in the comfortable is also manifest in her wanderlust as a travel writer. She travels to places as obscure as Skopje, North Macedonia, initially entranced by the idea of its anonymity, before she is unpleasantly jolted from her fantasy to find herself the subject of racist gawking. Chiamaka’s excessively sincere interest in the people and world around her lead her to explore the world and to date men with entirely different identities and dispositions than her own. Yet she always retreats back to reality, returning home to Maryland or momentarily settling for a Nigerian-American suitor who is perfect in her traditionalist parents’ eyes. She oscillates between seeking out what is most different from her, being maimed by it in some way, and retreating to the comfortable, before growing restless with it again. Yet, Chiamaka’s “dream count” is not a dreary catalogue of her failed relationships or disappointing travels but a testament to her capacity to strive for the unknown for which she longs. Adichie refreshingly rebels against a contrived notion of a feminist heroine who must always secure contentment despite her circumstances.

Zikora and Omelogor each affectingly face their own unknowns as well — Zikora a grueling childbirth without her partner who abandoned her months before the birth, and Omelogor the question of how to distance herself from the schemes that made her wealthy. Adichie’s portrayal of these characters heightens the struggle against the uncertain.

Effortlessly intertwining the women’s storylines, Adichie presents Kadiatou, Chiamaka’s kind housekeeper, as the most successful contender with the unknown. When an unforeseen obstacle jeopardizes the life she has built in a foreign country, she does not despair. In fact, she rejoices. Her face is “bathed in light” in the novel’s last line, the burden of having to single-handedly dismantle American injustice cast off her shoulders. Through Kadiatou, Adichie rejects the notion of a poster-feminist who must exuberantly tackle the unknown. Perhaps accepting the lack of a resolution or embracing the endless pursuit of it is most necessary to break free of its pressures.

As immigrants in the United States or even in their home country, the women inevitably come into contact, because of their identities, with the unknown. Yet, most of the women in Adichie’s narrative are not shining examples of how to take on the uncertain — perhaps a criticism of a world that constantly inserts the unknown in the women’s paths or makes it difficult for them to embrace it. But Adichie also does not have her women seek to overcome with any finality the unknown or make sense of it, rather to accept their ever-changing relationships with it. Her portrayal of the lives of Nigerian-American immigrant women is refreshing in that it simply seeks to be faithful to the paradoxes they experience, rather than place upon them any prescriptions for how to act in the face of it.

—Staff writer Alexandra M. Kluzak can be reached at alexandra.kluzak@thecrimson.com.