Publishers now pitch their books like Hollywood concepts, so Teju Cole’s first novel, “Open City” (Random House; $25), is being offered as especially appealing to “readers of Joseph O’Neill and Zadie Smith,” and written in a prose that “will remind you” of W. G. Sebald and J. M. Coetzee. This is shorthand for “post-colonialism in New York” (O’Neill), “lively multiracial themes” (Smith), “free-flowing form with no plot, narrated by a scholarly solitary walker” (Sebald), “obviously serious” (Coetzee), and “finely written” (all of the above). There is the additional comedy that Cole’s publishers, determined to retain the baby with the bathwater, boldly conjoin Smith and O’Neill, despite Smith’s hostility, advertised in an essay entitled “Two Paths for the Novel,” to O’Neill’s expensive and upholstered “lyrical realism.”
This busy campaign for allies does a disfavor to Teju Cole’s beautiful, subtle, and, finally, original novel. “Open City” is indeed largely set in a multiracial New York (the open city of the title). Cole is a Nigerian American; he grew up in Lagos, came to America in 1992, at the age of seventeen, and is a graduate student in art history at Columbia University. The book’s half-Nigerian, half-German narrator walks around New York (and, briefly, Brussels), and meets a range of people, several of them immigrants or emigrants: a Liberian, imprisoned for more than two years in a detention facility in Queens; a Haitian shoeshiner, at work in Penn Station; an angry Moroccan student, manning an Internet café in Brussels. This narrator has a well-stocked mind: he thinks about social and critical theory, about art (Chardin, Velázquez, John Brewster), and about music (Mahler, Peter Maxwell Davies, Judith Weir), and he has interesting books within easy reach—Roland Barthes’s “Camera Lucida,” Peter Altenberg’s “Telegrams of the Soul,” Tahar Ben Jelloun’s “The Last Friend,” Kwame Anthony Appiah’s “Cosmopolitanism.”
So the novel does move in the shadow of W. G. Sebald’s work. While “Open City” has nominally separate chapters, it has the form and atmosphere of a text written in a single, unbroken paragraph: though people speak and occasionally converse, this speech is not marked by quotation marks, dashes, or paragraph breaks and is formally indistinguishable from the narrator’s own language. As in Sebald, what moves the prose forward is not event or contrivance but a steady, accidental inquiry, a firm pressurelessness (which is to say, what moves the prose forward is the prose—the desire to write, to defeat solitude by writing). The first few pages of “Open City” are intensely Sebaldian, with something of his sly faux antiquarianism. On the first page, the narrator tells us that he started to go on evening walks “last fall,” and found his neighborhood, Morningside Heights, “an easy place from which to set out into the city”; indeed, these walks “steadily lengthened, taking me farther and farther afield each time, so that I often found myself at quite a distance from home late at night, and was compelled to return home by subway.”
But I hope the prospective reader will turn that first page, because the novel soon begins to throw off its obvious influences. The prose relaxes into a voice rather than an effect, and it becomes apparent that Cole is attempting something different from Sebald’s project. Eschewing the systematic rigor of Sebald’s work, as well as its atmosphere of fatigued nervous tension, Cole has made his novel as close to a diary as a novel can get, with room for reflection, autobiography, stasis, and repetition. This is extremely difficult, and many accomplished novelists would botch it, since a sure hand is needed to make the writer’s careful stitching look like a thread merely being followed for its own sake. Mysteriously, wonderfully, Cole does not botch it: “When I turned around, I saw that I was at the entryway of the American Folk Art Museum. Never having visited before, I went in”; “In early December, I met a Haitian man in the underground catacombs of Penn Station”; “The days went by slowly, and my sense of being entirely alone in the city intensified”; “At the beginning of February, I went down to Wall Street to meet Parrish, the accountant who was doing my taxes, but I forgot to bring my checkbook”; “Last night, I attended the performance of the Ninth Symphony, which is the work Mahler wrote after Das Lied von der Erde.”
The narrator of “Open City,” Julius, is in his final year of a psychiatry fellowship at Columbia Presbyterian, and the book covers roughly a year, between the fall of 2006 and the late summer of 2007. He is around thirty, and tells us that he came to America as a university student. He is estranged from his German-born mother; his father died when he was fourteen. But these personal details are withheld over many pages, and only very gradually sifted into the narrative. They finally arrive at a curious angle, so that we always feel, not unpleasantly, that the book began before we started it. We learn about Julius’s being African, for instance, by following clues: first of all, he discusses Yoruba cosmology; then he goes to see the film “The Last King of Scotland,” and mentions that “I knew Idi Amin well, so to speak, because he’d been an indelible part of my childhood mythology.” On the next page, he mentions that he was a medical student in Madison, Wisconsin, and recalls an uncomfortable dinner experience there, when an Indian-Ugandan doctor, forced to flee the country by Idi Amin, announced to his guests that “when I think about Africans I want to spit”: “The bitterness was startling. It was an anger that, I couldn’t help feeling, was partly directed at me, the only other African in the room. The detail of my background, that I was Nigerian, made no difference, for Dr. Gupta had spoken of Africans.” After thirty or so pages, we have discovered that Julius is Nigerian, but only by indirection. There is an interesting combination of confession and reticence about Julius, and about how he sees the world, and, insofar as the novel has a story, this enigma of an illuminated shadow is it—which turns out to be all we need.
Well, not quite, because we also need a flâneur to see interesting things in the city, and to notice them well, and Cole’s narrator has an acute, and sympathetic, eye. Sometimes he is witty and paradoxical, in a way that recalls Roland Barthes. Watching a park full of children: “The creak-creak of the swings was a signal, I thought, there to remind the children that they were having fun; if there were no creak, they would be confused.” More profoundly, he offers this paradox about Manhattan’s relation to its rivers:
Watching Simon Rattle conduct Mahler at Carnegie Hall, Julius is alive to the sorrow of the composer’s “long but radiant elegy.” He thinks of the strange fact that a hundred years ago, “just a short walk away from Carnegie Hall, at the Plaza Hotel, on the corner of Fifty-ninth Street and Fifth Avenue, Mahler had been at work on this very symphony, aware of the heart condition that would soon take his life.” Then, before the music has ended, an old woman rises from her front-row seat, and goes up the aisle: “It was as though she had been summoned, and was leaving into death, drawn by a force invisible to us. The old woman was frail, with a thin crown of white hair that, backlit by the stage, became a halo, and she moved so slowly that she was like a mote suspended inside the slow-moving music.” Cole prepares his effects so patiently and cumulatively, over many pages of relatively “flat” description, that the image of the old woman leaving as if for death, suspended like a mote in the music, seems not forced or ornamental but natural and almost inevitable.
At these moments, and, indeed, throughout “Open City,” one has the sense of a productive alienation, whereby Cole (or Julius) is able to see, with an outsider’s eyes, a slightly different, or somewhat transfigured, city. It is a place of constant deposit and erasure, like London in the work of Iain Sinclair (or in Sebald’s “Austerlitz”), and Julius is often drawn to the layers of sedimented historical suffering on which the city rests. There is, most obviously, the gaping void of Ground Zero: “The place had become a metonym of its disaster: I remembered a tourist who once asked me how to get to 9/11: not the site of the events of 9/11 but to 9/11 itself, the date petrified into broken stones.” But there were streets before the towers went up, cleared to make way for the new buildings, “and all were forgotten now. Gone, too, was the old Washington Market, the active piers, the fishwives, the Christian Syrian enclave that was established here in the late 1800s. . . . And, before that? What Lenape paths lay buried beneath the rubble?” The area of Manhattan between Duane Street and City Hall Park, where Julius walks, was once the Negro Burial Ground, where “the bodies of some fifteen to twenty thousand blacks, most of them slaves,” had been interred.
The modern city as unacknowledged palimpsest might seem a familiar theme, were it not renovated by Julius’s attention to the contemporary, in particular to those in danger of becoming modern victims of prosperous urban forgetfulness or carelessness. He goes with a church group to visit a detention center in Queens, and hears someone give a harrowing but riveting account of escaping the civil war in Liberia, arriving in Spain, and then, after two empty years in Lisbon, finally getting the chance to go to the States, on a Cape Verdean passport. “He had the option of saving money by flying to La Guardia, and he’d asked the ticketing agent if she was sure La Guardia was also in America,” Cole writes. “She had stared at him, and he shook his head, and bought the JFK ticket anyway.” It is at the more expensive airport that the émigré’s journey ends: for the past twenty-six months, he has been “confined in this large metal box in Queens.”
Julius is not, really, a natural sympathizer, despite his tender eye. He went with the church group because his girlfriend was going, and he can’t help noticing “that beatific, slightly unfocused expression one finds in do-gooders.” This complexity adds friction to his relationships with some of the people who, coming from the same continent as Julius, want to assert a kinship with him. A cabdriver is irritated that Julius gets in without a salutation, and upbraids him. “Not good, not good at all, you know, the way you came into my car without saying hello, that was bad,” the driver says, and continues, “Hey, I’m African just like you, why you do this?” But Julius feels “in no mood for people who tried to lay claims on me.” A black postal worker tries to read his bad poetry to Julius, and he makes a mental note to avoid that post office in the future.
The best, and longest, episode in the book is also Cole’s subtlest portrait of alienation and affection. Around Christmas, Julius goes to Brussels, ostensibly to look for his grandmother, who had been living there, but perhaps also to escape New York. At a local Internet café, he starts talking to Farouq, a young Moroccan who works behind the counter, and who surprises Julius with his reading material: a commentary, in English, on Walter Benjamin’s “On the Concept of History.” Julius is at first intimidated by Farouq’s intellectual confidence and ideological certainty, but he is attracted by it, too. Farouq “had the passion of youth, but his clarity was unfussy and seemed to belong (this was the image that came to me) to someone who had undertaken long journeys.” Farouq reveres Edward Said, is at ease with the work of Paul de Man and Benedict Anderson. He tells Julius that he prefers Malcolm X to Martin Luther King, because King’s passive resistance is too Christian: “This is not an idea I can accept. There’s always the expectation that the victimized Other is the one that covers the distance, that has the noble ideas; I disagree with this expectation.” To Julius, Farouq seems angry, “in the grip of rage and rhetoric,” and yet his animation and need are also exciting: “The victimized Other: how strange, I thought, that he used an expression like that in a casual conversation. And yet, when he said it, it had a far deeper resonance than it would have in any academic situation.” Farouq seems, to Julius, “as anonymous as Marx in London.”
A few days pass—Julius has a sexual encounter with an older Czech woman, spends a day in his rented apartment reading Roland Barthes (the French aestheticism a telling counterpoint to Farouq’s more ideological texts), and meets Farouq and a fellow-Moroccan, Khalil, for a drink. The two Moroccans work each other up, and now Farouq is more uninhibited, and perhaps more predictable. The conversation between the Moroccans turns on the question of whether America really has a left wing; on Israel, and how it has a reputation as a democratic state but is really a religious one; on how Saddam Hussein was the least of the Middle East dictators. Saddam, Farouq says, should be admired because he stood up for his country against imperialism. Julius protests, but is argued down. “As we spoke,” he reflects, “it was hard to escape a feeling that we were having a conversation before the twentieth century had begun or just as it had started to run its cruel course. We were suddenly back in the age of pamphlets, solidarity, travel by steamship, world congresses, and young men attending to the words of radicals.”
Soon, Farouq is telling Julius about his childhood, and his intellectual ambitions, how he came seven years ago from Morocco to Brussels, to study for an M.A. in critical theory: “I wanted to be the next Edward Said!” He wrote his thesis on Gaston Bachelard’s “Poetics of Space”:
Julius records this without obvious comment. The long scene ends with Julius still impressed by Farouq’s “seething intelligence” but fatalistically sure that he will remain “one of the thwarted ones.”
This is one of the very few scenes I have encountered in contemporary fiction in which critical and literary theory is not satirized, or flourished to exhibit the author’s credentials, but is simply and naturally part of the whole context of a person. And how very subtle of Teju Cole to suggest, at the same time—but with barely an authorial whisper—that perhaps Farouq leans too heavily on his theoretical texts, and that this was the real cause of the plagiarism charge. (The 9/11 scapegoating seems unlikely, though Julius doesn’t say so.) And how delicately Cole has Julius pulsate, in contradictory directions, sometimes toward Farouq, in fellow feeling, and sometimes away from him, never really settling in one position.
We learn a lot about Farouq’s anger, in these pages, but we also learn a lot about Julius’s liberalism—about its secret desires, its dissatisfaction with itself, and its passivity. More than anything, “Open City” seems a beautifully modulated description of a certain kind of solitary liberalism common to thousands, if not millions, of bookish types. Julius’s friends, for instance, are into various green and ecological causes; Julius stands to one side, and it is clear that his political inactivity has to do with his ability to see things so well. “It was a cause, and I was distrustful of causes,” he tells us, “but it was also a choice, and I found my admiration for decisive choice increasing, because I was so essentially indecisive myself.”
He is engaged but disengaged. He is curious about the lives of others, but that curiosity is perhaps purchased at the expense of commonality. (This contradiction is even more strongly felt in the work of V. S. Naipaul, whose influence is apparent in Cole’s book.) The city is “open,” but perhaps only in a negative way: full of people bumping their hard solitude off one another. One’s own small hardships—such as forgetting one’s A.T.M. card number, as Julius does, and being consumed by anxiety about it—may dominate a life as completely as someone else’s much larger hardships, because life is brutally one’s own, and not someone else’s, and is, alas, brutally banal. In a sad and eloquent passage, Julius suggests that perhaps it is sane to be solipsistic:
This is a brave admission about the limits of sympathy, coming as it does near the end of a book full of other people’s richly recorded stories. Julius is not heroic, but he is still the (mild) hero of his book. He is central to himself, in ways that are sane, forgivable, and familiar. And this selfish normality, this ordinary solipsism, this lucky, privileged equilibrium of the soul is an obstacle to understanding other people, even as it enables liberal journeys of comprehension. Julius sets out only to put people’s lives down on paper, and not to change them, as Farouq, his secret sharer and alter ego, would want to do. But then it is because Julius set out not to change Farouq’s life but to put it down on paper that we know Farouq so well. ♦