Americanah

Americanah struck me as a novel I would have enjoyed more when I was younger. I admired a lot about it — the author's unapologetic refusal to treat her Nigerian settings as anything but the default, her insights about the lives of immigrants, the arch portrayal of a certain stratum of well meaning Americans — but the narrative voice felt old fashioned and Victorian, more exterior to the characters than I've come to prefer from fiction. This book came out in 2013, and it was fascinating to see how its treatment of race already reads like an artifact from some distant age.