Teju Cole, Open City: breaking the rules of fiction?

Photo by Siegfried Poepperl on Unsplash

This novel, Cole's first, is a remarkable leisurely depiction of urban life, seen from a single perspective. It’s something like W G Sebald for cities. The narrator has a job as a psychiatrist, but for most of the novel we accompany him as he walks around New York, a true flaneur in the style of Baudelaire, observing and commenting on people he knows, but as well, observing city life – the people usually ignored in fiction.

The narrator, like the author, is Nigerian-American, which means he has a multiplicity of viewpoints with the people he interacts with. One of the fascinations of the novel is how the narrator appears seamlessly to be part of different communities: the classical music buffs at Carnegie Hall (he knows all the major Mahler conductors) as well as strolling around the Bronx and Harlem (and getting mugged by teenagers in Central Park).

Most of the novel is set in New York, except for a few  weeks in Brussels, another city, when the author has a fleeting sexual encounter with a stranger. It’s rather peculiar that he makes sure he is anonymous – he uses a  false name for the encounter. Come to think of it, there is a common theme of names throughout the book. He is constantly repeating names, forgetting the names of people he met, even the woman he has sex with:

Afterward, she told me her name:  Marta, Esther? I forgot it immediately.

All this is fascinating.. The narrator is a sensitive, reflective, rather passive, observer of events. The same seems to apply to his own relationships. He has a kind of girlfriend, Nadege, but she doesn’t make an appearance in the book, and they break up early in the story: “It  was painful, this breaking apart, but it surprised neither of us.”

To be honest, the narrator’s passivity drives me up the wall – I can’t help feeling he prefers to run away from any involvement.

But Cole commits, to  my mind, a fundamental error in a fiction title, a breach of the rules of fiction. It all the more astonishing since, right at the end of the novel, we learn something about the narrator that is totally out of keeping with what has come before. He is at a party, and meet a woman, Moji, who he knew many years before. She accuses him of forcing himself on her when he was only 14 and she was 15. While, she claims, he never mentioned it again, she has lived with this harm ever since.

Before this episode is introduced, the narrator appears to exonerate himself in a characteristically long-winded aside that turns out to be relevant to what follows:

Each person must, on some level, take himself as the calibration point for normalcy … whatever our self-admitted eccentricities might be, we are not the villains of our own stories.

And he concludes this long discussion:

From my point of view, thinking about the story of my life, even without claiming any especially heigtend [sic] sense of ethics, I am satisfied that I have hewed close to the good.

Immediately afterwards is this bombshell of an accusation. What jars is not simply that he should be accused of behaviour so diametrically opposed to everything we have learned of the narrator to date. It is that he does not rebut what his accuser says; he simply moves on, and we get a long account of a Mahler performance that seems to me to be avoiding the issue. If someone claims you violated her, should you not respond? Or, if this is a novel, should you not think to yourself (we are granted the narrator’s ability to reflect and review his own thoughts, in the narrative structure) about what has been said?

Instead, we get absolutely nothing: no mention from the narrator if this accusation is correct or false. Surely we have a duty as humans to respond, not simply to run away from such claims? By the end of the novel, my thoughts are not about the sensitivity of this observer of city life, but the weird fictional structure by which the narrator is accused but refuses to respond. It’s deeply unsatisfying.