New York City neuroses

All beauties, like all possible phenomena, have something of the eternal and something of the ephemeral – of the absolute and the particular. In Teju Cole’s new novel Open City New York City – a city engendering the eternal American values of the American Dream and social and political freedom while also reflecting America’s global power in its visual and historical grandeur – is seen through the particularised, localised point of view of Julius.

A lonely immigrant who struggles against the hustle and bustle of modern life, Julius is a nobody who represents the ephemeral nature of a society which grinds down the individuality of the individual.

Plot-wise it could be said that the novel concerns the aforementioned Julius, a half-Nigerian, half-German immigrant living and working in Harlem who upon completing his residency in psychiatry at a local hospital travels briefly to Brussels in search of his estranged grandmother.

But what really happens is that Julius does a lot of walking about and thinking. He walks around his neighbourhood and beyond to well-known and less well-known areas of New York City, manoeuvring his way through the urban sprawl of the Big Apple as Charles Baudelaire once did in Paris, physically, visually and mentally taking in his surroundings.

The plot – or any semblance of such a thing – serves as little more than a smokescreen for Cole to explore more profound issues like the loneliness of urban life and the effect of modernity on the individual and his or her individuality.

He also waxes lyrical about art, history and film, pondering everything from the work of J.M Coetzee and Goya to the Forest Whitaker movie The Last King of Scotland.

Untypical and un-American, Julius is an outcast, a displaced character to whom American life and culture is both foreign and alienating. He feels an “ulcerous sensation of too many things happening at once”; the traffic on Sixth Avenue looks to him like “rush-hour gladiators testing each other’s limits”.

Caught in a confusion of memories, identities and a sense of time slipping away Julius recedes from reality into his memories. But even these memories seem somehow unreal or inauthentic. Julius’ recollections are undermined by disclaimers like “now I think of it” and “I remember (or imagine I remember)”. The lines between the truths and untruths of his life, history and thoughts are blurred throughout.

Through his myriad observations Julius comes across as a witty, erudite and likeable character. A flâneur in the classical sense, Julius is able to view the city with a sense of detachment, perhaps due to his being an outsider.

Like any good flâneur, his attention to detail is impressive. As is Cole’s stream of consciousness style delivery of his protagonist’s thoughts. For instance, when walking Manhattan’s coastline Julius offers an observation on the city’s relationship with its rivers:

“This strangest of islands, I thought, as I looked out to sea, this island that turned in on itself, and from which water had been banished. The shore was a carapace, permeable only at certain selected points. Where in this riverine city could one fully sense a riverbank? Everything was built up, in concrete and stone, and the millions who lived on the tiny interior had scant sense about what flowed around them. The water was a kind of embarrassing secret, the unloved daughter, neglected, while the parks were doted on, fussed over, overused”.

The thick foliage of dense language on display in this thought-provoking paradox is typical of Cole’s style throughout. So too are the profound realisations. Here one is led to think that New York is embarrassed of its natural heritage. Nature is dominated by its paving over with roads and buildings. Open spaces are enclosed and converted into state-owned parks.

Concretisation and commodification reign supreme. At one point Julius remembers being asked 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”.

Yes, Julius’ new home is, in Alicia Keys’ immortal and catchy words, a “concrete jungle where dreams are made of”. However as Julius (or Cole) finds, these dreams are often shallow and unfulfilled, and the concrete jungle joins people more in their solitude than ambitions.

A relatively slim novel, Open City is separated into chapters that read more like fragments of thoughts than linear narrative. Just as his protagonist’s long walks take him through the back alleys and bright lights of the city, from Manhattan to Harlem, so Cole’s meandering musings take him through the dark corners of Julius’ “inconsistent” soul, through culture, history and his own personal demons.

As Harvard scholar James Wood has recently commented, the excellent structuring and style of the novel’s narrative has a meandering quality which makes it appear “followed for its own sake”. Open City begins mid-story and has no conclusive ending. It wanders in to its reader’s consciousness before exiting quietly, having left an indelible mark.

Tweeting about the Nobel Prize for Literature, recently awarded to Swedish poet Tomas Transtromer, Cole (@tejucole) recently mused, “It is possible that the best writer in the world right now is not widely known in the US. Given how little we translate, it’s even probable”.

An interesting thought, it also jars with the recent media hype surrounding him as a global writer in the vein of Arundhati Roy or Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.

Open City has been praised in the media as the work of a man at home in the world, exhibiting a rare talent that should take him to the forefront of today’s global writers. But what do phrases like “global writer” and “world fiction” actually mean?

As Cole asserts, so little world literature (for want of better words) is translated and read in the US these days – as well as in other publishing hotspots of England and France – that today’s leading examples of the genre are often simply novels written in English, directed to Western audiences and marketed by massive publishing houses.

Indeed, though several reviewers have called Open City Cole’s debut novel, it is in fact his second. The first, Every Day is for the Thief, was published in Nigeria and as a consequence received little attention on a global perspective. Ironic given that Cole’s debut was a depiction of contemporary Lagos, arguably a more global – if we take global to mean foreign and different – setting than another novel about a contemporary New York.

Written in English and set in New York, Open City hardly transports the reader into an unknown and unrepresented part of the world and shouldn’t be seen as an example of outsider or second or third world literature. It is better seen as a real – and completely original – gem in the litany of post-9/11 novels that explore the American condition after the events of that day a decade ago.

If anything the appraisal of Open City as a great global novel detracts from the true qualities of the book. These are found not in its globality, its considerations of different cultures, peoples and landscapes. Rather they are found in the subtle observations Cole makes about the banality of Western life, his anxieties rooted within the urban sprawl of New York and therefore engendered with a charming and compelling locality.

A solemn love letter to a New York that for Cole homogenises peoples and cultures as well as offering much vibrancy and opportunity, Open City is a novel which deserves care and attention. Like Julius, do it at walking pace.

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