One to watch: Teju Cole

His debut novel, Open City, has been a surprise hit in America. A weak-kneed James Wood called the book “beautiful, subtle, and, finally, original,” while Colm Tóibín championed it as “a novel to savour and treasure.” Above all, it has been hailed as a landmark in post 9/11 fiction. But in a year of retrospectives and reassessments of the World Trade Centre attacks and their aftermath, Teju Cole’s voice will stand out for its awkward novelty.

Open City’s protagonist bears close resemblance to Cole himself: a graduate student living in New York, having grown up in Nigeria with European heritage. Julius is a psychiatrist, curious about the lives of others, but aware of the limits of his sympathy. He wanders around the city contemplating identity, race, and self-consciousness, coming into regular and fleeting contact with the frustrated and repressed: a Liberian refugee locked in limbo in Queens, a survivor of Nazi-occupied Belgium, a Moroccan student in Brussels with extremist sympathies.

Through Julius’s interactions with these characters and their stories, Cole explores the prevailing themes of Open City: memory and self-awareness. As the detained refugee recounts his story in Queens, Julius confesses to playing up to the role of “the compassionate African who paid attention to the details of someone else’s life and struggle”; but is irritated by a cabdriver who demands acknowledgment for being “African just like you.”

Julius is detached—distrustful of people laying personal or political claims upon him. Willing to listen and quick to comprehend, he nevertheless remains passive and largely unsympathetic. He is offended by the Moroccan student’s extremism, for example, but refrains from arguing too forcibly against it. And an encounter with a childhood friend from Nigeria reveals a chilling episode from his past that Julius has chosen to blot out, hinting at his own intellectual dishonesty.

Cole’s work will please those who claim the traditional novel fails to convey the reality of 21st century life. Through his cultured narrator, Cole constructs a novel that deals in “layers of ideas”—spanning photography, art, colonial history, music and critical theory—rather than a conventional plot. And while the fallout from 9/11 is at the heart of the Open City, Cole’s approach is oblique. As he says, “My view…is that you can best write about [9/11] by writing about other things. And by understanding that catastrophic trauma is not new in this city.”

Julius’s New York has a complex history of freedom, success, oppression and suffering that its millions of residents either acknowledge or ignore, consumed instead by their own self-consciousness and the routine banality of their lives. As Julius concludes: “we play, and only play, the hero, and in the swirl of other people’s stories, insofar as these stories concern us at all, we are never less than heroic.” It is this swirl of stories, told through an imperfectly heroic but astute narrator, that constitute the core of Open City. Above all, they allow Cole to place America’s latest identity crisis in a wider social and historical context, and, a decade on from 9/11, to announce himself as a significant new voice in this year of reflection.