Americanah and Book Sex

I read Americanah on a recommendation. I wouldn't have known to pick it up, with its brown-bag cover and an author whose name I didn't recognize. It can be difficult to choose a novel from its cover. The jacket summary of a non-fiction book gives a fairly clear idea of what's within. Less so with a fiction book. What a novel is about doesn't necessarily indicate much about the experience of reading it.

Americanah's jacket promised a story of reunited lovers. Most of the novel was backstory, narrative threads from the past and present are woven together. Beautifully written, relevant backstory, but memories nevertheless. The main character reflects on her time at east coast Ivy league school, her old boyfriends, and her adaptations from Nigeria to America and back again. She writes a blog, and we get to read some of the posts. The lovers didn't reunite until the very last chapters of the book. It's an intelligent book, and it doesn't have a fast-paced plot. The adventure unfolds in an everyday manner. Characters deal with money problems, work and school, family, relationships and marriages. Someone with an action bent would be less likely to appreciate the book.

Part of the reason I'm drawn to teen fiction is the absence of graphic sexuality; Americanah is not a teen book. To me, exploring sexuality on a deeper level than abstraction seems an intimate act, not something to be shared with an author I've never met and characters who aren't even real. Sometimes sex advances the plot, but detail usually isn't needed. The same goes for violence. In both cases, and whenever content doesn't seem to serve plot, it seems like selling out. Some other motive than art or storytelling has taken over. I read novels anyway, but I don't think it benefits me or my life to add these sexual vignettes to it. The sensation is jarring, like you're patting a beautiful, silky bearskin rug and suddenly your hand comes across a fleshy wart. The joy screeches to a halt and you wish you could scrub away the feeling, like you touched something private without wanting to and you can't take it back. It lingers in your head like the imagined wart germs linger on your fingers even later on after your hands are clean. You can't wash away the feeling with soap, and that's what you would be rid of. Only forgetting cures. I wonder why it was included, what I was supposed to gain from it.

Americanah reminded me of Free Food for Millionaires. The immigration-to-America angle, the tale of a woman of color, finding a place in a world split into old and new, America and elsewhere, mixing languages, customs, foods, East Coast Ivy League schools. Parents who just don't get it because their world was too different and they come from a different generation. Casual sex and infidelity, sometimes implied and sometimes depicted. The writing is confident, direct, spare, un-self-conscious.

Americanah's prose earns the description "lyrical." It's fascinating to read of America through another's eyes. Things we don't notice. What bothers Ifemelu as her own particular person as opposed to what bothers her as a Nigerian. Women in both cultures dissemble, but Ifemelu is blunt and open about her desires. It brings to light issues of race and culture from a perspective I'd never have, yet in my language. The world seems hostile. I remember again that my American passport brings unconscious and unimaginable privilege.

The book paints a bleak view of male-female relationships. Ifemelu's world includes a lot of trading sex for money, both directly and in more nuanced and socially acceptable ways.

Like a Russian novel, the names pose a problem. I wonder how these books would be different for me if they used names I could recognize for the characters. I wonder what nuances have been lost in my confusion and inability to determine a characters's gender by their name. This isn't a complaint, obviously, just an observation.

I heartily recommend it, with a caveat about its occasional sexual content, if you appreciate good writing for its own sake. I don't recommend it if you said of The Great Gatsby, "nothing happens."