Walking and talking in New York

FICTION: EMILY FIRETOGreviews Open CityBy Teju Cole Faber Faber, 259pp. £12.99

IN HIS essay Theory of the Dérive, Guy-Ernest Debord describes a type of walking that is more than a simple stroll, but rather is an activity of psychogeography – in a dérive, one drops "all their usual motives for movement and action and lets themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there". The movement of a dériveisn't random; Debord understands a city to have contours, vortexes, and currents, which both encourage or discourage entrance into particular "zones".

The city in Nigerian writer Teju Cole's debut novel is New York, and it is a city delivered in fragmentary, almost hallucinatory parts – the end of a marathon at Columbus Circle, sidewalk merchants in Harlem, a snowstorm in Central Park, a tourist asking for directions to "9/11: not the site of the events of 9/11 but to 9/11 itself, the date petrified into broken stones". The main character is Julius, a 30-something psychiatry student in the last year of his residency. Though he calls his dérives"evening walks", we soon learn he walks across the city not just at night but also on his days off and at the weekends. Through Julius we see a city composed of various birds and flora, snow and rain, masses of crowds and abandoned streets. But for Julius, it is primarily a city of immigrants; he is an obsessive marker of ethnicities and holds a running catalogue of whom he has seen. Though his residency is almost complete, he doesn't seem too concerned with future plans – instead he is content to go for walks, visit museums and attend concerts. His eerie detachment from work begins to suggest a somewhat unreliable narrator.

Julius – who was born in Lagos to a German mother and a Nigerian father – seems disengaged from his past as well. Though we learn that he is estranged from his mother and that his father died when he was a teenager, there is little about his life in Nigeria that is given fully; events are presented piecemeal, partially obscured. The longest story about his youth concerns the desire for a cold bottle of Coca Cola.

The progress of this novel, instead of being marked by character development, comes through a culmination of the almost comical array of people Julius meets. On the plane to Belgium, where he goes on holiday, he sits next to a retired Belgian doctor. In Brussels, he spends hours talking to Farouq, the Moroccan employee at an internet cafe, who delivers, almost as in a lecture, his beliefs on Israel, racism in European academia and Muslim extremism. Back in New York, there is an African cab driver, a Liberian man imprisoned at a detention facility, a Mexican runner finishing a marathon, a Haitian shoe shiner at Penn Station, and a poetry-spewing post office worker. There is also Julius's former professor, an elderly Japanese man suffering from cancer, whom Julius tries to visit often. In all these seemingly intimate encounters, however, individuals share their own stories and beliefs, theiraspirations and goals, without eliciting any divulgement from Julius himself.

What results is a quiet and cumulative novel – there are no plot twists or surprises, but rather a layering of consciousness; its erudite, free-flowing stream of consciousness is reminiscent of WG Sebald’s novels. In an overly formal and careful prose, Cole presents us with a scholarly perambulator making constant links to the world of classical music, art, history and culture. His alienation manifests itself in the stories of others, suggesting that all stories – like avenues of a city or paths in the brain – are interwoven, seeking connection, even existing as one entity. Whatever our solipsistic narrative, Cole proves we are never the villains in our own stories. “In fact, it is quite the contrary: 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.”

Emily Firetog is a contributing editor at the Stinging Fly. She is currently pursuing an MFA at Columbia University in New York