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(More customer reviews)There is no reason to believe Teju Cole intended his debut novel to present a challenge to reviewers, but that is what "Open City" does. The only way a critic can genuinely convey the force of this book -- its full weight and effect -- is to break a covenant with the potential reader by entering the forbidden territory of the spoiler. But revealing the specific shock that hits you like a block of concrete when you reach the novel's final pages is something no responsible critic will do that.
Instead, you are apt to come across a positive review of "Open City" saying the novel is, in some non-specific way, a "tour de force." Another will cagily suggest something's amiss by labeling the story's narrator, Julius, a 32-year-old Nigerian-American who is completing a psychiatry fellowship in New York City, "an unreliable narrator." I will put it this way: what this enormously talented writer has succeeded in doing is crafting a multi-layered reading experience that you'll be dying to talk about with other readers.
Since Cole is a newcomer, critics are stepping over themselves trying to identify a comparable veteran. Which writer will Cole remind the reader of? Candidates are piling up. One is Joseph O'Neill, who, like Cole, is a writer of mixed parentage and hence multicultural perspective. O'Neill's 2008 novel, "Netherland," similarly explores themes of displacement and anxiety in post-9/11 New York City. Another is Zadie Smith, who, like Cole, unabashedly tackles matters of race, class, the immigrant experience, and the suppressed elements of history whose exposure is our moral duty.
W.G. Sebald is mentioned as well, presumably for his erudition and a shared style of writing that is slow and meditative, seemingly without much of a plot, and dependent on the cumulative accretion of observations. Cole, however, is not a formal innovator like Sebald, and the reader may be relieved to learn Cole is a conventional technician, using standard-length sentences, paragraphs, and chapters. Albert Camus' "The Stranger" also has been cited as a model. At first blush this makes some sense (Meursault and Julius are both protagonists of alienation). But my view is if Cole is following Camus, a stronger influence is "The Fall," with its restless, talkative confessor.
Another author I'd place on the list of comparables is Elizabeth Hardwick. Cole shares Hardwick's keen turn of mind, her love of music, and her unerring command of language. Cole today, as Hardwick two generations ago, feasts on the endless supply of attractions on the walkable streets of Manhattan. Both writers tune their ears to the innumerable personal stories waiting to be heard. (Cole has said he wanted "Open City" to show how New York City is "a space full of ghosts and unfinished psychological business.") Finally, like Cole, Hardwick showed no fear in letting autobiography undergird her fiction, notably in her New York novel, "Sleepless Nights."
And, to add one more plate to the table: I see resemblances to the methods of Roberto Bolano's "By Night in Chile." Although Bolano's short novel uncovers different sins and belongs to an earlier time of stress in a foreign nation, it shares with "Open City" a narrator prone to non-stop outpouring of stories, of exquisitely observed morsels of experience. Both narrators, it could be said, are engaged in a sort of "talking cure," on a path to revealed truth. In both novels, readers may find the meandering style frustrating. A stream of consciousness leaves some cold. Yet in each story it all adds up, at last, to form a devastating contemporary psychological portrait.
But enough. Let Teju Cole and "Open City" be what they want to be: each reader's own discovery.
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