This is Not About Toto's Africa

Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie had been on my "to read" list for at least two years and I'd heard nothing but glowing reviews, so imagine my chagrin when I realized I wasn't digging the main character, Ifemelu. Otherwise, the writing was excellent, the story was wide yet detailed with interesting framing and compelling secondary characters. I had to Wikipedia the book to make sure it was independent from "Dear White People" because many of the same points spring up (blogs, racial critiques & racism, Ivy League schools, hair, etc). I spent a lot of this book questioning if I disliked it because I'm a WASPy American and I just didn't "get it" -- also possible, although I was concurrently reading Yaa Ngasi's Homegoing and loving that book, so ... different strokes for different folks?

Homegoing lacked the literal confrontation of Americanah's blog post excerpts and had less fleshed-out characters in favor of a poetic magical-realism vibe that spanned hundreds of years. I couldn't believe this was Ngasi's first novel and can't wait to read more from her. The novel follows two branches of the same family who lose their history because of slave trade. The separate threads continue in Africa vs America until the two re-tie at the conclusion; in general, this is also the plot of Americanah. Ngasi and Adichie are both writing about black identity (loss of, discovery of), but their styles are quite different.

While I thought both books had unwavering focus on the black/African experience, I felt at several points in Americanah that Ifemelu was completely consumed by thinking about her blackness, constantly, to the detriment of more fully realizing her character in the book. Part of this could be that Ifemelu is occasionally (but not exclusively) the author's mouthpiece, and commentary sections that could've been written by the author-as-omniscient-narrator were instead framed as Ifemelu's thoughts and blog entries. Anyway, she was just straight up mean to her closest friends and family and that part of her character never improved. A morality tale this was not. Better summary here.

However, this interview with Adichie was illuminating:

"I think we often expect female characters to be easily likeable, in a way we don't expect male characters to be," the author explains. "Do we expect to like Nabokov's or Roth's characters? No. We expect them to be interesting. And I wanted Ifemelu to be that kind of character, where sometimes you want to smack her and sometimes you want to hold her close. Because I think that's human."

I was immediately reminded of how much I COULD NOT STAND the main character Coleman Silk from Roth's The Human Stain. Interesting? Yes. Did he make that novel excruciatingly frustrating to read? Yes. Was he also a huge dick to his family? Oh yeah. Same deal with Humbert in Lolita and, I fear, whatever the hell is going on in Pale Fire. Look, I understand the naturalism of having your "protagonist" be someone with human faults but I'm also trying to get through a 500-page journey with them. Be kind, I beg of you.

Fav quotes from Homegoing:

"Weakness is treated someone as though they belong to you. Strength is knowing that everyone belongs to themselves." (p38)

"How could he explain to Marjorie that what he wanted to capture with his project was the feeling of time, of having been a part of something that stretched so far back, was so impossibly large, that it was easy to forget that she, and he, and everyone else, existed in it -- not apart from it, but inside of it." (p295)

Bottom line: Both excellent reads about racial identity and separation.