"The Arrangement" - An American Election Year Short Story by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. (2016, on Webpage of New York Times Book Review)

"The Arrangement" -   An American Election Year Short Story by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

From The New York Times Book Review, June 16, 2016

My main purpose in this post is to make sure my readers know they can read for free a short story by the great  Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche inspired by Mrs Donald Trump.  

This brief fiction is told from the point of view of Melania Trump, wife of the republican standard bearer, Donald Trump.  In just a few pages Adiche captures the full horror of Donald Trump, the cultural emptiness of the America he represents.  Melania's  relationship with Trump is depicted as that of a vacuous, self-centered woman who submits to and plays on the fragile ego of her man child  

Husband in the exchange for a life of pampered luxury.  Most of her time is spent on time filling activities  designed to keep her attractive to her husband.

As I read this story, especially when I heard the advise Melania's mother gave her on how to get as much as she can from Trump was I reminded  very much of Henry Fielding's classic novella, Shamela in which a scheming mother teaches her far from pure daughter how to sham innocence to entrap a rich man.  

Melania is having  a fiftieth anniversary dinner for her parents.  The butler has arranged it all.  The story takes place on that day.

This is a very good perceptive story, a pure joy to read.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie grew up in Nigeria. Her work has been translated into thirty languages and has appeared in various publications, including The New Yorker, Granta, The O. Henry Prize Stories, the Financial Times, and Zoetrope. She is the author of the novels Purple Hibiscus, which won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and Half of a Yellow Sun, which won the Orange Prize and was a National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist, a New York Times Notable Book, and a People and Black Issues Book Review Best Book of the Year; and the story collection The Thing Around Your Neck. Her latest novel Americanah, was published around the world in 2013, and has received numerous accolades, including winning the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction and The Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize for Fiction; and being named one of The New York Times Ten Best Books of the Year.

A recipient of a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, she divides her time between the United States and Nigeria.  From the author's webpage 

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