Akwaeke Emezi's novel set in Nigeria is an exciting but difficult descent

Like Akwaeke Emezi's genre-hopping work, the Nigeria-set novel “Little Rot” resists easy categorization. It has the dark twists and pace of a thriller, the ambitious scope of literary fiction, the language of poetry, and the longing of romance.

The catalyst for this rollercoaster story from Emezi, a prolific National Book Foundation honoree, is love gone sour. Young upper-class Nigerians Aima and Kalu fell in love in Houston. But Kalu has a family business to run in Lagos, and when they return to her homeland, the ground beneath her feet changes. Like plants that lean toward the sun, Kalu and Aima lean toward the fundamental, sometimes toxic, forces that shaped them.

Soon, neither of them can recognize the person they fell in love with. Kalu wants to be a modern man, but he indulges with impunity once he plunges back into his privileged Naija life. Aima misses her more egalitarian arrangements, even as she conforms to the conventional good girl mold she cultivated in her upbringing. And she resumes a fervent religiosity that she had abandoned abroad.

Several years later, their love is more muted. When the frayed threads finally break, Aima explodes. In a perfectly staged fight scene, with “the eyeliner on her heart-shaped face,” Aima laments, “You'll never marry me! …Four years of my life that I went and wasted you! What do you think this looks like in the eyes of God?

Aima is angry, ashamed and tired of waiting for the commitment. Kalu can't believe she's pushing for respectability instead of waiting until they're both ready to get married. So Aima buys a ticket to London and Kalu takes her to the airport, although she wants to beg him to stay with her. Emezi writes beautifully about that pain, about how, although Kalu knew she should reassure her, “the harsh, bitter truth was that she simply did not recognize who she was looking at.”

What happens next takes “Little Rot” into thriller territory. Kalu tries to drown his sorrows in alcohol, drugs and partying. To her surprise, Aima basically does the same. Instead of boarding the plane, she takes refuge with her dashing childhood best friend, Ijendu, the queen bee of a “bad gehl” crew.

These coping strategies may be fine in other places, but Emezi vividly portrays New Lagos as a dangerous place to lose one's boundaries. Instead of guiding Kalu and Aima to a soft landing, their best friends and potential lovers, enemies, escorts, and hangers-on help them on their journey through soul-killing corridors.

At a low point, a distraught, drunk and drugged Kalu hears that the private rooms of the sex party he attends, hosted by his best friend, Ahmed, may be a staging room for the abuse of girls. Kalu doesn't believe it, or at least he doesn't want to, but he needs the truth. Instead of comfort, he finds a nightmare, and her harsh attempts to intervene put a heavy price on his head.

The novel is full of heartbreaking twists: beatings, kidnappings, murders. They and the cast of characters are drawn with precision. But the most significant aspect of “Little Rot” is the boldness with which it depicts the many facets and consequences of sexual attraction and identity in a setting that purports to have narrow conventions.

There is a good amount of sex in “Little Rot” and its presentation is tremendously varied. Sometimes it's about true intimacy, reminiscent of Emezi's popular novel “You Did a Foolish Thing with Your Beauty” or, in the case of a flashback, akin to a sentimental coming-of-age story. Both sets of best friends: Kalu and Ahmed; Aima and Ijendu: test the sexual and psychological limits of their friendships. The complicated, deeply loving, and sublimated sexual attraction between Ahmed and Kalu may be the sweetest and saddest story in the novel.

Emezi also portrays the brutality, exploitation and deceptions that follow situations where full consent is not possible and money and power are left unchecked. Ahmed's club offers a window into the dangers of commodifying sex and how indulging dark fantasies endangers the humanity of all parties involved.

Amidst a plethora of wahala, Emezi creates a motif of soul rot, exploring how malleable ethics can ultimately degrade the soul. New Lagos plays an integral role in these transformations. Contemplating an overripe banana in his pantry, Kalu thinks, “Maybe their love was like that, just going bad from sitting on a shelf for too long,” a process accelerated by Nigeria's hot, humid climate (double meaning). The conservative customs of the city, which persist despite its libertine hypocrisies, deform and torture the characters. Aima, for example, egged on by her friends, worries that at home Kalu wants someone calmer and eventually “leaves her for a pounded yam woman because they are easier, and this is Nigeria and isn't he a man?”

While most people in Kalu’s circle convince him to follow custom and get married simply to appease the girl, “Ahmed was different. He understood the little rebellion. …he understood things that Kalu didn't tell anyone else, like how he struggled to hold on to who he was even when the city tried to strip him of it.”

Kalu wonders how his friend always seems unaffected by the forces that ruin everyone else. Ahmed’s response is disturbing: other people “didn’t know their own filth. … They come here and the rot grows inside them like a weed,” while “I started from the gutter, so I was prepared. “There was nowhere left for me to sink.” In less skilled hands, these meditations could curb the momentum. But the mix of melodrama, danger and existential angst in “Little Rot” is surprisingly entertaining and beautifully crafted.

Still, operating in the space between genres is a risky art. Corrupt love stories don't offer much joy to readers, and for a thriller, there are a lot of moral issues. Kalu, Aima and Ahmed descend abruptly into darkness, but the novel never unravels the source of the rot. Without a clearer idea of ​​how New Lagos evolved to this point of piety and perversity, “Little Rot,” for all its merits, veers toward cynicism.

Carole V. Bell is a cultural writer and media researcher who explores politics and identity in art.