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A review by simonmee
Stay with Me by Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀
3.0
You got me.
You pulled it off with the big reveal. I wasn’t clever enough to work it out myself.
You created a mystery: “How the absolute **** could those characters act like that?” I asked myself.
And you answered that question. So bravo.
The Unreliable Narrator versus The Unlikeable Narrator
Yejide and Akin are a married Nigerian couple under pressure to have children. Shock, horror, things do not go well. Adébáyọ̀ leads us to believe it is an inexplicable fertility problem:
When the doctor asked about our sex life, Akin held my hand before he answered and stroked my thumb as he said, Our sex life is normal, absolutely normal.
The big reveal towards the end is that Akin is impotent. Yejide withholds from us that Akin is lying to the doctor. Learning of Akin’s impotence dramatically changes our previous perceptions of characters’ actions.
To give an example of the cleverness of Adébáyọ̀’s misdirection, while leaving clues, look at their relation with Akin’s brother Dotun. Akin enlists Dotun to impregnate Yejide, which Yejide doesn’t know at the time (I would suggest suspending your disbelief on some of what happens to enjoy the wide points). When Yejide first sleeps with Dotun, we get a series of wildly contradictory emotions within one page:
I felt a strong sense of pity for my poor sister-in-law. Was this it?
There was something different about being with him, something fuller. I wanted to try it again.
My first instinct was to tell Akin, but how does one tell one’s husband: I want you to fuck me the way your brother did?
I wanted to run downstairs to Dotun, to tell him, See! See what Akin can make me feel on just my face. SEE!
From a perspective of infertility, it reads like a rollercoaster ride of insanity. From the perspective of Akin’s impotence, the lines take on new meaning. The uncertainties of Yejide are due to a new, and very different experience.
Now, the explanation doesn’t make Yejide a good person (or Akin, for that matter), but Adébáyọ̀ doesn’t owe us that. She showed us a character who’s actions and feelings seemed inexplicable, then with one new fact, made them very explicable. As to whether they are justifiable… …well, the reader can take it or leave it.
Imperfections
That being said, the book should probably carry a trigger warning for anyone suffering from erectile dysfunction. Prepare to feel insecure as Dotun later teased my body to orgasm after orgasm. Yejide clearly likes what Dotun… ...uh… …has, even though Dotun isn’t exactly a success story in life otherwise. Each to their own I guess but, dare I say it, there seems to have been a failure of imagination on Yejide’s and Akin’s part up to the point of Dotun’s introduction, from a purely pleasure perspective.
The big reveal does adversely affect the characterisation of Akin. Yejide is a flawed character who may make disagreeable but comprehensible decisions. Akin is just a pastiche of a character who actions I only comprehend as set-ups for Yejide. Akin is often absent for reasons that are somewhat but inadequately revealed. He’s also a blunderer, whether in his over-complicated set up of Yejide and Dotun, or being unable to not shove someone down stairs. Akin is a plot device, and a flaccid one at that. Unsurprisingly I am totally unconvinced of Yejide and Akin’s great love. They once each thought the other was hot and that’s then expected to pull the emotional weight of their relationship. It’s doesn’t work and I don’t believe it.
There’s a couple of what I feel are mechanical issues with the first person perspectives:
We understand that of Yejide is having a phantom pregnancy early in the story because of multiple sources of evidence presented to her. She receives the information in a form she can process and then... …simply says, ’The doctor I met does not know what she is doing’. It feels like she is artificially self-aware of her unself-awareness.
Akin doesn’t like the local story of Iroko, which ends sadly with the loss of a loved one:
I hated this version because I did not believe that anyone would trade a child for anything else.
So she “improves” it, in that she makes it more random, much sadder and removes its moral. She tells this incredibly grim story to her 5 month-old daughter because, ummmm, she’s improved it. Five-month daughter dies immediately after (unrelated reasons to being told this story, I should add). It transparently feels like Adébáyọ̀ had Yejide create a sadder story of Iroko to ensure we feel sad in the immediately subsequent scene.
But I did get got. Credit where credit is due.
You pulled it off with the big reveal. I wasn’t clever enough to work it out myself.
You created a mystery: “How the absolute **** could those characters act like that?” I asked myself.
And you answered that question. So bravo.
Spoiler
The Unreliable Narrator versus The Unlikeable Narrator
Yejide and Akin are a married Nigerian couple under pressure to have children. Shock, horror, things do not go well. Adébáyọ̀ leads us to believe it is an inexplicable fertility problem:
When the doctor asked about our sex life, Akin held my hand before he answered and stroked my thumb as he said, Our sex life is normal, absolutely normal.
The big reveal towards the end is that Akin is impotent. Yejide withholds from us that Akin is lying to the doctor. Learning of Akin’s impotence dramatically changes our previous perceptions of characters’ actions.
To give an example of the cleverness of Adébáyọ̀’s misdirection, while leaving clues, look at their relation with Akin’s brother Dotun. Akin enlists Dotun to impregnate Yejide, which Yejide doesn’t know at the time (I would suggest suspending your disbelief on some of what happens to enjoy the wide points). When Yejide first sleeps with Dotun, we get a series of wildly contradictory emotions within one page:
I felt a strong sense of pity for my poor sister-in-law. Was this it?
There was something different about being with him, something fuller. I wanted to try it again.
My first instinct was to tell Akin, but how does one tell one’s husband: I want you to fuck me the way your brother did?
I wanted to run downstairs to Dotun, to tell him, See! See what Akin can make me feel on just my face. SEE!
From a perspective of infertility, it reads like a rollercoaster ride of insanity. From the perspective of Akin’s impotence, the lines take on new meaning. The uncertainties of Yejide are due to a new, and very different experience.
Now, the explanation doesn’t make Yejide a good person (or Akin, for that matter), but Adébáyọ̀ doesn’t owe us that. She showed us a character who’s actions and feelings seemed inexplicable, then with one new fact, made them very explicable. As to whether they are justifiable… …well, the reader can take it or leave it.
Imperfections
That being said, the book should probably carry a trigger warning for anyone suffering from erectile dysfunction. Prepare to feel insecure as Dotun later teased my body to orgasm after orgasm. Yejide clearly likes what Dotun… ...uh… …has, even though Dotun isn’t exactly a success story in life otherwise. Each to their own I guess but, dare I say it, there seems to have been a failure of imagination on Yejide’s and Akin’s part up to the point of Dotun’s introduction, from a purely pleasure perspective.
The big reveal does adversely affect the characterisation of Akin. Yejide is a flawed character who may make disagreeable but comprehensible decisions. Akin is just a pastiche of a character who actions I only comprehend as set-ups for Yejide. Akin is often absent for reasons that are somewhat but inadequately revealed. He’s also a blunderer, whether in his over-complicated set up of Yejide and Dotun, or being unable to not shove someone down stairs. Akin is a plot device, and a flaccid one at that. Unsurprisingly I am totally unconvinced of Yejide and Akin’s great love. They once each thought the other was hot and that’s then expected to pull the emotional weight of their relationship. It’s doesn’t work and I don’t believe it.
There’s a couple of what I feel are mechanical issues with the first person perspectives:
We understand that of Yejide is having a phantom pregnancy early in the story because of multiple sources of evidence presented to her. She receives the information in a form she can process and then... …simply says, ’The doctor I met does not know what she is doing’. It feels like she is artificially self-aware of her unself-awareness.
Akin doesn’t like the local story of Iroko, which ends sadly with the loss of a loved one:
I hated this version because I did not believe that anyone would trade a child for anything else.
So she “improves” it, in that she makes it more random, much sadder and removes its moral. She tells this incredibly grim story to her 5 month-old daughter because, ummmm, she’s improved it. Five-month daughter dies immediately after (unrelated reasons to being told this story, I should add). It transparently feels like Adébáyọ̀ had Yejide create a sadder story of Iroko to ensure we feel sad in the immediately subsequent scene.
But I did get got. Credit where credit is due.