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It Was Supposed to Be a Fun Night Out. It Led to a Criminal Underworld.
In Akwaeke Emezi’s latest novel, “Little Rot,” two exes trying to recover after a breakup inadvertently stumble into a dark, disturbing and dangerous side of Nigeria.
Chelsea Leu is a writer and critic whose work has appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Atlantic and elsewhere.
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LITTLE ROT, by Akwaeke Emezi
There’s an art to depicting things going seriously wrong very quickly, and Akwaeke Emezi’s latest novel, “Little Rot,” is a masterwork of the form.
The story takes place over the course of roughly 28 hours, during which a man flees an assassination attempt, another has a knife plunged into his kidney, and yet another is strangled to death while having sex. Astonishingly, none of these events feel gratuitous. Instead, they’re conveyed with an inexorable precision, even an elegance; the reader feels like an unwilling witness to the world’s dark truths. The effect is mesmerizing.
Emezi — who has produced three previous novels, a memoir, a poetry collection and two young adult books since 2018 — has a gift for melding polished prose with the delectable urgency of a page-turner. This latest novel begins, mundanely enough, with a breakup. Then … well, then the situation deteriorates with irresistible speed.
After moving home from Houston to New Lagos, Nigeria, Aima rediscovers her Christianity and demands a proposal from her boyfriend, Kalu, who refuses. To distract themselves from their heartbreak, each seeks solace in a Friday night out with a best friend: Kalu is cajoled by Ahmed into attending one of the sex parties he organizes, while Aima cuts loose on a drunken, debauched evening with Ijendu. The narratives of their respective nights run parallel, eventually radiating out, as the next day dawns, to include the perspectives of Ahmed and two sex workers connected to him, Souraya and Ola. As the novel progresses, the threads of this entangled cast are pulled taut around the shadowy, spider-like Thomas Okinosho, or “Daddy O,” a wealthy pastor with a flock of millions and an untold influence in New Lagos’s murky underworld.
This underworld has its own unnerving presence — characters refer to its corrupting force as “rot.” “You think you’ll never be a part of things you hate; you think you’re protected somehow, like the rot won’t ever get to you,” a woman tells Kalu at the sex party. “Then you wake up one day and you’re chest deep in it.”
Her words are prophetic. Shortly after the exchange, Kalu barges into a locked backroom at the party and finds a horrific scene: a naked, bound teenage girl surrounded by eager men. The sight traps him in a world of coercion and brutality in service of humanity’s darkest desires — the decay that forms the novel’s focus.
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