Early success can weigh heavily on a novelist. Writers are allowed to improve with age, to have a ‘breakthrough’ or ‘break-out’ novel later in their careers. But there is a special place and pressure reserved for the literary wunderkind. Of these Teju Cole is one. His talent seemed to arrive fully formed with his debut novel, 2011’s Open City, a first-person journey through Manhattan, Brussels, and Lagos.
Reading Tremor, Cole’s second novel after more than a decade, one may wonder if it will be his misfortune to struggle with that early promise. The two books have some things in common. At their core is the story of a man from Nigeria who (like Cole himself) makes a home in the US, enjoys reading and classical music, has interesting conversations, travels, and works at a university. And both are very much concerned with perspective: Julius, the narrator of Open City, mirrors the stories of the people and cities he encounters, a diaspora consciousness relaying his experiences and observations in cool, erudite prose. Towards the end of the novel, one of Julius’s childhood friends accuses him of raping her when they were teenagers. Julius, apparently with no recollection of the event, brushes over the matter in the same beautiful, affectless style, and we are left feeling foolish (perhaps complicit) for taking the work as a piece of straightforward autofiction. The effect is unsettling and enigmatic, anticipating Rachel Cusk’s technique in her Outline trilogy.
In Tremor, Cole’s anxiety about perspective shines rather in the telling than the showing. Our main character, Tunde, is a photographer and lecturer at Harvard. The novel begins in the third person, as Tunde and his wife Sadako shop for antiques in Massachusetts. Tunde finds a ci wara for sale – a headdress used by the West African Bambara people – and wonders at its provenance and dispossession. He travels to Mali and muses on the role of his own photography: ‘How is one to live in a way that does not cannibalize the lives of others, that does not reduce them to mascots, objects of fascination’?
There is a tension in Tremor between the mystery that Cole values in the novel form (‘My goal in writing a novel is to leave the reader not knowing what to think’) and the didactic, professorial attitude of his protagonist. Through the use of the third person the book loses some of what made Open City so suggestive — the jolts and twists and drama of the self. In one section, Cole’s narrator leaves Tunde and switches to the first person, providing snapshots of different lives in Lagos – a sex worker, a fabric seller, a student. Their stories are variously funny and heartbreaking. Our bridge to this polyphonic city is Nelson, Tunde’s driver, who briefly undermines the character’s worthiness: ‘sometimes my tip is nothing just because he’s tired’. The intrigue of this short passage recalls the best of Open City. Tremor, gorgeous in glimpses, is the lesser novel.
Words: Eve Hawksworth
