Americanah
A Nigerian woman arrives in America and learns, for the first time, that she is "Black." Adichie's 2013 novel maps the untranslatable gap between an African and an African-American identity with surgical precision. Its blog chapters changed how literary fiction can use social media as voice. The most important novel about race written in the 21st century so far.
The blog posts are reprinted whole inside the novel, and readers describe the result as “a 477-page opinion essay with some characters thrown in.” Minor characters arrive already assigned their function, “only introduced so that Ifemelu can lecture them,” then leave. Readers who wanted the novel back say “the ratio of story to lecture leaves me wanting more story.” Ifemelu herself comes off “snobby and wasn’t entirely likable” to readers who notice the book never asks her to be wrong about anything. At close to five hundred pages the back half gets “stretched to the point of sluggishness,” and the romance carrying it is thinner than the argument riding on top.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
