A Bloated Blog 
 At the opening of this long and too, too solid novel, Ifemelu, its protagonist is about to return to Nigeria when her fellowship at Princeton ends. After fifteen years in America, she has learned enough to write a lifestyle blog called "Raceteenth or Various Observations About American Blacks (Those Formerly Known as Negroes) by a Non-American Black." A mouthful, but she has eyes in her head and a savage wit. Before it even develops as a story, Adichie's book is likely to interest us in much the same way that a blog would, whether to convey Ifemelu's first impressions of America (starting with tipping, dressing down for parties, and how to get a job on a student visa), or her flashbacks to her native land. Watching her grow up in Lagos, for example, we meet her father who is sacked from his civil service job for his refusal to address his superior as "Mummy," and her cousin Uju, a fully-qualified doctor who nonetheless lives as the kept mistress of a prominent General. Simply on the level of information and what can be gleaned from a different viewpoint, the book is fascinating. 
 But what about the story? If you read the summary inside the cover (presumably to become the book-flap blurb), you will see that it starts with two high-school sweethearts in Lagos, Ifemelu and Obinze. You read that Ifemelu will obtain a visa for the USA and move there for fifteen years, but that Obinze, who stayed to finish his degree in Nigeria, was excluded by an America fearful after 9/11 so instead spent several years living illegally in London. Finally, you will be told that Ifemelu and Obinze meet up again on her return and "face the toughest decisions of their lives." All well and good, but most of this story takes place in the first 100 pages; the meeting-up and not-so-tough decisions occupy only the last 50 pages of a 475-page book. So in between, there are around 300 pages that have very little narrative thrust at all, but are basically a commentary on daily life in the various countries--the raw materials, in fact, for Ifemelu's blog. 
 Paradoxically, my interest picked up at first when I came to this section, because Adichie's observations are just so spot-on. So, for example, when she is interviewed for a job as a nanny by a woman on the Philadelphia Main Line: 
 Ifemelu would come to realize later that Kimberly used "beautiful" in a peculiar way. "I'm meeting my beautiful friend from graduate school," Kimberly would say, or "We're working with this beautiful woman on the inner-city project," and always the woman she referred to would turn out to be quite ordinary-looking, but always black. 
 Ouch! And most of her observations are equally acute. But once Ifemelu actually starts "Raceteenth," we come to a long series of chapters whose sole purpose is to set up the blog posting that is printed verbatim after each. There are cocktail and dinner parties whose only function is to display American (or in one case British) attitudes to race. Much attention is paid to the rise of Barack Obama and contemporary reactions to it, all parsed with 20/20 hindsight. We soon feel that the developments in Ifemelu's life--her jobs, partners, challenges, and opportunities--exist as object lessons rather than the organic growth of a person we care about. But there is one scene that Adichie keeps returning to, a pan-African conversation when Ifemelu gets her hair braided in a Trenton storefront salon; this has more depth than most of what surrounds it--and it is hardly coincidental that it takes place after her blog has been shut down. 
 The last section of the novel, back in contemporary Lagos, briefly gains traction with similarly sharp insights into Nigerian life. But it is hardly worth the hundreds of pages of preaching we must read through to reach it. The publisher should have edited this novel down to half its length, and paid Adichie to bring out that blog separately. But this unwieldy combination of the two is a bloated hybrid that does its talented author no favors.