Mind Picker: A Spell of Good Things

She had always marvelled at his calm reassurance that everything good in his life would either remain the same or get better. He took good fortune for granted. As though it were impossible that it would abide only for a spell. She had never been able to shake the sense that life was war, a series of battles with the occasional spell of good things.

I’ve read quite a few books set in modern-day Nigeria (enough to acknowledge that as colonists drew the country’s borders, this enforced association of unaffiliated tribes is no cultural monolith), and while I am open to learning more about the pressures that any group of people live under, I really didn’t learn anything new in A Spell of Good Things. Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀ (whose previous novel Stay with Me did expand my heart and mind) is going for an intergenerational epic here: Rotating between the POVs of many members of an upper class and a lower class family, she demonstrates the ways in which every Nigerian is negatively affected by political corruption, lack of investment in social programs and infrastructure, and entrenched social customs. But there really wasn’t anything new or surprising in the details. Adébáyọ̀’s characters are well-drawn and sympathetic — it’s hard not to wince as various people are controlled or beaten by those who have power over them — but overall, the writing is straightforward, often dull, and builds to a dramatic conclusion devoid of any literary or philosophical payoff. This was fine, but I wouldn’t give it the Booker Prize.

God forbid she ever say it out loud, but Kúnlé was a much better catch than she expected for Wúràọlá. The longer Wúràọlá had remained single, flitting from one unserious boyfriend to another, the more Yèyé had worried that, when she did decide to commit to one of them, closer to thirty than twenty, she would be left with a pool of expiring men who were unmarried because no one wanted them. On her worst days, she had imagined Wúràọlá ending up with some barely educated drunkard whose parents lived in a house with no indoor plumbing. And how would that have improved on her daughter’s fortunes in this life?

Although the novel rotates between nine POVs, the two main characters are: Ẹniọlá — a poor boy in his last year of secondary school, whose father had been laid off from his teaching job years before, and as the dad now spends his days in bed staring at the wall, Ẹniọlá’s mom is forced to beg and scavenge to afford her children’s school fees and rent on their squalid flat, and: Wúràọlá — a brilliant doctor rotating through her hospital residencies, from a rich and influential family, whose mother is pressuring her to get married. Although these two characters couldn’t be more different, the failings of their government affect them in the same ways: lack of investment in education and healthcare sees not enough teachers and books for Ẹniọlá, not enough fellow doctors or medicine for Wúràọlá; without enough food, Ẹniọlá is lucky to get one meal a day, whereas Wúràọlá is too busy to stop and eat more than once a day; with an upcoming election, venal politicians will put pressure on Wúràọlá’s father to support this one or that if he wants to continue getting government contracts, while those same politicians won’t be above hiring a poor boy like Ẹniọlá to enforce a different kind of pressure:

Ẹniọlá pressed his forehead against the window. So what if he was carrying a machete? Holy Michael had not asked him to hurt anyone with it, he was just going to scare people a little. If he could help his mother and sister, could whatever made it possible be as wrong as his father claimed?

While not very much happens for most of the novel, Ẹniọlá on a bus with a machete does initiate dramatic events, and while I see that many reviewers think the ending justifies the journey, I’m going to shield myself behind the Kirkus review that refers to this “trajectory” as “predictable and moralizing”; hey, their words, not mine.

I found it interesting that Adébáyọ̀ presents the female characters as smarter and more capable than their male partners — although Ẹniọlá is shown as desperate to complete his education, it’s his younger sister who gets perfect grades; Wúràọlá is a respected doctor while her fiancé couldn’t pass the entrance exam to med school; Ẹniọlá’s mom will do anything to support her family while his dad is too depressed to even apply for work; Wúràọlá’s mother, Yèyé, has secret investments in case their “spell of good things” runs dry (advice she received from her very capable older sisters); even the tailor shop (a storyline that I think could have been cut without losing anything) is owned by a woman. It was interesting that women can succeed in this society — there doesn’t seem to be any barrier to girls receiving the same educational opportunities as boys — even though they still suffer under sexist customs (the women aren’t complete until they’re married; the poor family’s landlord will only deal with the dad, even though it’s the mom who scrapes together the rent; there are countless rules for prostrating themselves before, addressing, and serving the men.) Even so, I was intrigued that Adébáyọ̀ would present someone as independent and intelligent as Dr Wúràọlá getting giddily caught up in the admiration of others once she does get engaged and I was a bit disgusted by Wúràọlá enumerating the reasons why she doesn’t want to leave Kúnlé once he starts abusing her, ending her list with “he’s hot and I love that he’s mine”. Just, no. I get that Adébáyọ̀ is addressing both sexism and classism — and the extra pressures put on people by a corrupt government — but I honestly don’t think she’s saying anything new here: yeah, these things are bad; no, this didn’t do much for me.