What is This Novel? 
 I chose this debut novel by the Nigerian writer Chigozie Obioma because I had just finished 
 Under the Udala Trees 
 by Chinelo Okparanta--a book in which I felt the form did battle with the content--and wanted to calibrate it against another book from the same tradition. And it is true: Obioma uses a similar mixture of songs and folk tales in his novel, and similar interpolations in Igbo, Yoruba, or Pidgin, though less persistently than Okparanta. But while I never doubted what Okparanta was trying to do--write an impassioned personal denunciation of the limitations placed on women--I have no idea what Obioma's purpose is, whether he means his story to be taken literally, with a degree of magical realism, or as some kind of parable. 
 The narrator, Benjamin Agwu, is nine when the story opens in 1996. He is the fourth of six children in a family living in the town of Akure. His older brothers Ikenna and Boja share one bedroom; he shares another with his slightly older brother Obembe; the much younger David and their infant sister Nkem play little part in the story. Just before the book opens, the children's father, who works for the Bank of Nigeria, is sent to a town in the north, and can visit his family only on alternate weekends. The four brothers take advantage of his absence by fishing each day in the forbidden and dangerous Omi-Ala River, a disobedience which earns them a severe thrashing when their father finds out. But already the foursome has begun to disintegrate. Ikenna is cursed by a filthy madman on the banks of the river, who prophesies his brutal death. Before the book is over, brother will have turned against brother in a horrible escalation of the Cain and Abel story, making the prophecy come true, and virtually every other bond holding the family together will be broken. To quote the title of the famous Chinua Achebe novel that the boys have to study in school, Things Fall Apart--and with a vengeance! 
 The adult Benjamin tells his story in an inventive voice that mingles unexpected words with normal ones; his father, for example, calls a whipping a Guerdon. Many of his images are simply marvelous ("Mother owned copies of our minds in the pockets of her own mind"); others strain too hard for effect ("the dying sun pitched in the corner of the sky as faint as the nipple on the chest of a teenage girl a distance away"). Many aspects of the book suggest a popular narrative style. The chapters, for instance, have one-noun titles ("The River," "The Eagle," "The Python"), explained by their first lines ("Ikenna was a Sparrow," "Boja was a Fungus," "Obembe was a Searchdog"), as though the book were a collection of fables. The frontispiece shows a map of Akure drawn as a tribal village, where everyone knows everyone else, and much of the book is written that way. But look it up, and you will see a busy city, with six lanes of traffic on its main street. Is perhaps Obioma giving us a child's-eye view on reality? Yet so much of his action is way over the top: the gruesome appearance, odor, and grossly indecent behavior of the madman Abulu, for instance, or the relentless way in which everything goes from bad to worse in the most spectacular way possible. 
 So what is this novel? Certainly not a literal account of Nigerian life today. A Greek myth told in folk style? A Shakespearean tragedy, ditto? A parable, perhaps, on how life falls apart if the traditional bonds are broken? An allegory of a country that can descend into tribalism at the drop of the hat? Or something more specific, perhaps related to the death of ideals when the politician MKO Abiola, who also makes an appearance in the story, was imprisoned after the 1994 stolen election? Or just a good story? I don't know. On Amazon, I rounded my 3.5-star rating up rather than down, feeling that a writer so talented deserves the benefit of my doubt. But I don't think it is quite 4 stars in Goodreads terms.