Akwaeke Emezi’s Nigeria-set novel is a thrilling but tough descent

Like Akwaeke Emezi’s genre-hopping body of 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 yearning of romance.

The catalyst for this roller-coaster tale from Emezi, a prolific National Book Foundation honoree, is love turned 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 their homeland, the ground beneath them shifts. Like plants bending toward the sun, Kalu and Aima bend toward the foundational, sometimes toxic forces that shaped them.

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

Several years later, their love is more muted. When the fraying threads finally break, Aima explodes. In a perfectly pitched fight scene, with “her eyeliner down her heart-shaped face,” Aima wails: “You’re never going to marry me! … Four years of my life that I went and threw away on you! How do you think this looks in the eyes of God?”

Aima is angry, shamed and tired of waiting for commitment. Kalu can’t believe she’s pushing for respectability rather than waiting until they’re both ready to marry. So Aima buys a ticket to London, and Kalu takes her to the airport, even though he wants to beg her to stay. Emezi writes beautifully of that ache, of how although Kalu knew he should reassure her, “the raw bitterleaf truth was that he simply didn’t recognize who he was looking at.”

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

These coping strategies might be fine elsewhere, but Emezi vividly portrays New Lagos as a dangerous place to lose your boundaries. Instead of guiding Kalu and Aima to a soft landing, their best friends and potential lovers, foes, escorts and hangers-on aid their tour through soul-killing corridors.

At a low point, a grieving, drunk and high Kalu hears that the private rooms at the sex party he’s attending, which is hosted by his best friend, Ahmed, may be a staging room for the abuse of young girls. Kalu doesn’t believe it, or at least doesn’t want to, but he needs the truth. Instead of reassurance, he finds a nightmare, and his rough attempts to intervene put a large price on his head.

The novel is full of these harrowing twists — hits, kidnapping, murder. Both they and the cast of characters are precisely drawn. But the most meaningful aspect of “Little Rot” is how boldly it depicts the many facets and consequences of attraction and sexual identity in a setting that pretends toward narrow conventions.

There’s a fair amount of sex in “Little Rot,” and it’s wildly varied in presentation. Sometimes it’s true intimacy, evoking Emezi’s popular novel “You Made a Fool of Death With Your Beauty,” or, in the case of one flashback, akin to a sentimental coming-of-age story. Both sets of best friends — Kalu and Ahmed; Aima and Ijendu — pressure-test the sexual and psychological boundaries of their friendships. The complicated, deeply loving and sublimated sexual attraction between Ahmed and Kalu may be the novel’s sweetest and saddest story.

Emezi also portrays the brutality, exploitation and disappointments that follow situations where full consent isn’t possible and money and power go unchecked. Ahmed’s club offers a window into the dangers of commodifying sex and how catering to dark fantasies jeopardizes the humanity of all parties involved.

Amid 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 part in these transformations. Contemplating an overripe plantain in his pantry, Kalu thinks, “Maybe their love was like that, just spoiling from being kept on a shelf for too long” — a process quickened by Nigeria’s hot and humid climate (double meaning intended). The city’s conservative mores, which persist in spite of its libertine hypocrisies, warp and torture the characters. Aima, for example, egged on by her friends, worries that at home, Kalu will want someone quieter and eventually “leave her for a pounded-yam woman because they are easier, and this is Nigeria and is he not a man?”

While most people in Kalu’s circle coax him to go along with custom, just marry to pacify the girl, “Ahmed was different. He understood the small rebellion. … He understood things Kalu didn’t tell anyone else, like how he was struggling to hold on to who he was even as 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 answer is troubling: Other people didn’t “know their own dirtiness. … They come here and the rot grows like a weed inside them,” whereas “I started from the gutter, so I was prepared. There was nowhere left for me to sink to.” In less skillful hands these meditations might slow momentum. But the blend of melodrama, peril and existential angst in “Little Rot” is shockingly entertaining and beautifully wrought.

Still, operating in the space between genres is risky art. The corrupted love stories don’t offer readers much joy, and for a thriller, there’s a lot of moral hand-wringing. Kalu, Aima and Ahmed descend steeply into darkness, but the novel never roots out the source of the rot. Without a stronger sense 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 culture writer and media researcher exploring politics and identity in art.