A Nigerian-American psychiatrist, studying at Columbia Presbyterian, walks through New York City:
“And so when I began to go on evening walks last fall, I found Morningside Heights an easy place from which to set out into the city. The path that drops down from the Cathedral of St. John the Divine and crosses Morningside Park…”
The part of Manhattan, which Teju Cole describes at the beginning of his debut novel Open City, happens to be where I have lived for half a decade; his steps are so known to me that I cannot walk on the same streets now without thinking of Cole’s thoughtful narrator, who adds, “though traffic makes the river on the other side of the trees inaudible.” Anyone who has ever lived in Manhattan is intimate with this cacophony, which competes with the muted sounds of nature. A prismatic symphony: the perfect soundtrack for walking.
Julius, the main character, is an educated, artistic flâneur who reads Roland Barthes and St. Augustine, attends Mahler concerts in Carnegie Hall, and can speak with the same ease about fine arts as the author himself might (Cole attended Columbia and, according to his blog, attended the same photography exhibit his unnamed protagonist visited). The distance between Cole and the ambling Julius is minimal; the reader takes for granted that the author is positioning himself inside of his own story. The immediacy of the first person blurs the partition between Cole and his subject. It may be presumptuous to label Open City an autobiography of sorts, but Cole works in much the same vein as a skilled poet like Marie Howe or Frank Bidart, or fiction writers such as Ernest Hemingway, David Foster Wallace, or Thomas Bernhard; the reader recognizes the works may be fictional, but cannot affirm that the details of the narrative are not in fact simply retellings of actual events.
Orhan Pamuk writes of this thin veil between fiction and reality in his book The Naïve and Sentimental Novelist:
Once we have searched for a deeper meaning in the novel’s complex landscape, have derived pleasure from the sensory experience of the protagonists…and have completely immersed ourselves in the world of the novel, we can forget about the writer himself. (48)
Pamuk cites an experience where an acquaintance he met assumed he lived on the same block as his protagonist in The Museum of Innocence, Kemal. In answer to the posed question, “ Mr. Pamuk, are you Kemal?” he stated the following:
1. “No, I am not my hero Kemal.”
2. “But it would be impossible for me to ever convince readers of my novel that I am not Kemal.”
Herein lies the predicament in novels like Open City, where the voice of the narrator is so convincing, so utterly enmeshed with the action, that it leaves little space for the reader to step away and develop his or her own conceptions about who the character is, the best characters being the ones in which the reader can—circuitously—see himself, or at least feel a certain empathy for. This is why Cole’s unnamed protagonist is flawed: Cole relies solely on Julius's voice (his opinions, his pseudo-intellectual banter, his worldviews) and fashions a novel around it. But not much happens in this novel. Let me rephrase that; in actuality, many banal occurrences are described in sparkling, fairly hygienic prose (he visits an ailing Japanese professor; he sees a John Brewster exhibit; he views some migratory birds; he visits Brussels to find his grandmother; he views the cornucopia in a Chinatown shop), but all of these incidents are conveyed with the same peripatetic, uniformed tempo, echoing the Andante pace the narrator takes on his itinerant sojourns through Manhattan.
I covered the city blocks as though measuring them with my stride, and the subway stations served as recurring motives in my aimless progress. The sight of large masses of people hurrying down into underground chambers was perpetually strange to me, and I felt that all of the human race were rushing, pushed by a counter instinctive death drive, into movable catacombs. Above ground I was with thousands of others in their solitude, but in the subway, standing close to strangers, jostling them and being jostled by them for space and breathing room, all of us reenacting unacknowledged traumas, the solitude intensified. (p. 7)
But what are these traumas the narrator alludes to? Open City lacks an overarching structure, depending rather on the almost unbearably intelligent vignettes to push the narrative forward. There is an amorphous quality to even the most detailed renderings of the scintillating grid work that is Manhattan: “The water was a kind of embarrassing secret, the unloved daughter, neglected, while the parks were doted on, fussed over, overused;” “…so I walked under the arbor of elms, passing by rows of concrete chess tables, which were oases of order and invitations to a twinned solitude;”“Traffic growled low alongside us, the sound of impatient, churning engines, and gasoline smoke adding menace to the park’s perfumed world.” Cole offers glimpses without any kind of emotive disclosure. The prose is glancingly beautiful, chromatic in the way it intimates passion without explicitly describing it, yet one feels somewhat alienated from the characters, the glimpses of the city merely fractured missives which are not convincingly emblematic of a larger theme.
Yet Open City is an articulate and auspicious debut. In the best novels, as Pamuk writes, “the writer is most present in the text at the moments we most completely forget about him. This is because the times we forget about the writer are the times we believe the fictional world to be actual…and we believe the writer’s mirror…to be a perfect and natural mirror.” What Cole hopes to convince us is that the actual world is, in fact, fictional. And the author succeeds in a difficult feat: his narrator remains enigmatic while still retaining the attention of the reader. There was not one moment when I wanted to put the book down in favor of another. I was as riveted by the idiosyncrasies of a Haitian shoe shiner as by his sexual encounter with a Czech woman in Brussels. In one of my favourite passages, Julius attends a concert in Carnegie Hall to listen to Mahler. Before the music ebbs, an elderly woman abandons her front row seat and walks up the crimson aisle: “It was as though she had been summoned, and was leaving into death, drawn by a force invisible to us.” Cole’s subtle elegance is at its best here, and the understated acuity of his solitary characters rises to meet us; a slow but steady promenade. ~JMB
