‘Too much exposition too heavily handled, leaving too few memorable voices and characters’ – Voice of America by EC Osondu

Since it came out late last year, EC Osondu’s début effort, Voice of America, has garnered more attention from the mainstream review media than I’d usually expect for, firstly, a new author, and secondly, a short-story writer. Okay, so he’s published by Granta, which lends the whole endeavour a real aura of Serious Literature, but I reckon – and feel free to shout me down – that  the main engine driving the publicity machine is that he’s a Nigerian author writing about his country and its people. Since, I’d say, 2003, Nigeria’s been one of the hottest pieces of ass in the literary world, thanks to Chimanda Ngozi Adichie’s well-deserved successes with Purple Hibiscus, and, later, Half Of  A Yellow Sun (2006) and The Thing Around Your Neck (2009). Not to play down the influence of the mighty Chinua Achebe, of course, but Adichie’s definitely gotten a whole new generation of readers looking to this particular part of Africa for literary gold. And – here’s my contentious bit – I’m not sure that Osondu’s success, so far, isn’t partly a result of riding that wave.

Okay, I know I sound curmudgeonly there. It’s not like he’s come from nowhere. As the dust-jacket is keen to point out, this is an award-winning author we’re dealing with: he won the 2009 Caine Prize for African Writing for ‘Waiting’, the opening story in the book; ‘Jimmy Carter’s Eyes’, also included, was short-listed for the same prize in 2007; and ‘A Letter From Home’ won the Allen and Nirelle Galson Prize for Fiction in 2006. Like Adichie, he’s studied in the USA, getting his MFA from Syracuse, and these days he teaches in Providence, Rhode Island. He’s tried and tested. But the book itself? Well, we’ve all got different tastes and expectations, but, for my money, I’d want something meatier. Plenty of the stories had interesting narratives – more on that later – but I found the language mostly flat and uninspiring. Example: ‘He was sweating slightly, like someone at the verge of something.’  Or: ‘The men removed their clothes and stood in their underwear, which was in various colors, sizes, and different states of disrepair.’ I want more than that. I don’t think everything needs to be elaborated upon and described in excruciating detail, and I like Hemingway as much as the next person, but this doesn’t (to me) read like stripped-back prose; it’s just underdeveloped. And there’s little variation as the book goes on; the different narrators blended into one another and I found it hard to distinguish between their voices. Osondu maybe tries to get himself out of this corner by sticking a wanna-be writer into the very first story – you could read the rest of the collection as the work of this kid – but that’s a gimmick and I’d like to think he wasn’t going for such an easy twist.

Likewise, many of the stories depend heavily on dialogue – ‘Waiting’, ‘Jimmy Carter’s Eyes’ and ‘Voice of America’ in particular – and there was little differentiation between the speaking, often minor, characters’ voices. Now, I can see what he was going for here. There’s a Greek chorus thing happening with the voices of the villagers in several of the stories – the protagonists are advised, egged-on, discussed and condemned by their neighbours while the reader’s introduced to various customs, traditions and legends that give the situations a local colour that he – most likely a non-Nigerian reader – will probably be looking for in the collection. Osondu’s also playing on an oral tradition of story-telling, I think, and he occasionally creates a sense of cacophony that really works – ‘Jimmy Carter’s Eyes’, in which everybody in a village has an opinion on how a child’s blindness might be cured, is one of the better examples. But I often felt that the unbroken streams of dialogue took away from the stories, with too much exposition too heavily handled, leaving too few memorable voices and characters. My main impression, having read the collection straight through, was that the lack of linguistic and stylistic variety was a significant weakness – if you like one story, you’ll probably like the lot, but if you don’t like one, well, it’s not likely to be your book of the year.

Leaving aside my gripes with the style and the language, Osondu’s main success is thematic – his plots are all of a type, but it’s a strong type that’ll appeal to plenty of readers: poverty, migration, culture-clashes. The stories are set across Nigeria (mainly in Lagos) and the USA, and they deal with how the two countries intersect and interact. We’ve got Red Cross refugee camps in Nigeria (‘Waiting’), villagers trying to get western visas (‘Going Back West’), boys trying to get American girlfriends (‘Voice of America’), green-card marriages (‘I Will Lend You My Wife’), Americans happily or unhappily misplaced in Nigeria (‘Our First American’, ‘An Incident in Pat’s Bar’), emigrants struggling to reconcile their adopted culture with their inherited one (‘Miracle Baby’), and emigrants disillusioned with the way their lives have turned out, despite having reached the promised land (‘The Men They Married’). The collection is named for the US Government’s external broadcasting service – as listened to by the characters in the eponymous final story – and it’s a good, appropriate title: the voice of America does boom out over these peoples’ lives, offering them  sanctuary and  deceptive hopes of riches and success, as advertised by the letters from (often lying) relatives who’ve already made the Atlantic crossing. Osondu’s plots are engaging and his characters’ situations and dilemmas are often heart-breaking. They’re all looking for some escape – from poverty, from routine, from one other – and they’re mostly thwarted, though there are a few moments of optimism and love that temper the gloom – ‘Teeth’, about a Nigerian couple having a baby in America, is a lovely example of the latter.

Any Cop? Try before you buy. If the writing style works for you, and you’re interested in contemporary Nigerian village culture (unlike the university types that Adichie mainly features) you’ll probably be a fan – so I’d suggest you read one or two of the stories first (some of them can be found for free online) and then see if you want to make the leap. It didn’t really work for me; whilst the settings and themes were appealing, I didn’t like how they were executed. But I’m known to be a grumpy sort. Check it out for yourself.  

Valerie O’Riordan