Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is a bit odd. In some ways it's just a recounting of two people's lives over the course of about 20 or so years. Nothing particularly unbelievable ever happens. The book more or less has the feeling of finding out a friend from high school had a baby or started a business. Life going forward at the steady pace it usually does.
The book for the most part hinges on race and immigration, although neither of the main characters are much interested in activism. Ifemelu, a Nigerian woman who's spent the last 15 years in the United States running a race blog, is planning to move back home to Lagos. In her blog she would recount different stories of interactions she's had or things she's witnessed, all under the pseudonym of the Non-American Black. As the book goes on we get to rad a few of these posts. Most of them end with a call for audience participation, either to share advice or tell their own stories. Interestingly, Ifemelu seems to be only an observer of race in the States, as opposed to an activist.
Yes, she goes to talks and gives presentations on the interactions she sees, but after seeing that the people who attend these talks don't especially want to hear that they might (just maybe) be racist, she backs off. She still writes the same way she always did, but to these attendees she is much gentler.
Throughout her time in the US, Ifemelu is largely passive. She (and other characters) talk about race often, they point out that of course racism is bad, and of course it would be preferable if no one had to think about it (but racism needs to be addressed and it is hard to address something without talking about it). Outside of this however, Ifemelu is largely a person who experiences racism and that is all. Americanah is a book about her experience of American culture and her experiences.
The other main driving point of the book is her series of relationships. Her first is in the background, an idealized thing which she can compare her other two relationships to. Her next is with a rich white guy who flips back and forth between awareness of the microaggressions his partner faces and blissful ignorance of them. Her final relationship (before returning to Nigeria) is with a Black Yale professor. This second relationship draws a very sharp contrast between an outspoken academic and his race-conscious friends and Ifemelu, by all means an ordinary woman who generally agrees with the friends but finds them to be somewhat overbearing.
Americanah is a well-written book. The prose is tight, with cute tongue in cheek references to itself sprinkled throughout the book ("You can't write an honest novel about race in this country" (336)). Overall, it's a book about relatively ordinary people living relatively ordinary lives.
I think the general feeling of this book can best be summed up here, on page 473:
The female stood pecking at something on the ground and then, after a while, it walked away, indifferent to the male's great flare of feathers.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2013. Koller-Collins Collection PR9387.0.A34354 A44 2013
