Tremor by Teju Cole

Tremor
by Teju Cole
Penguin Random House, 2023

Partly by accident, partly by request, I had a leisurely summer reviewing novels by Black American writers. First were two dismissible genre works, the over-the-top prison satire Chain-Gang All-Stars and the under-powered college novel The Late Americans by, respectively, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah and Brandon Taylor, writers under 40 new to me. Then came some genial storytelling one could take to the beach by somewhat older novelists I’ve been following for a long time: Colson Whitehead’s Crook Manifesto and James McBride’s The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store. Now it’s back to school with Harvard professor Teju Cole’s Tremor, a throwback to the challenges of century-old high modernism and high seriousness.

“I’ll buy the flowers myself,” says the wife of Tunde, Cole’s Harvard professor protagonist as they prepare for the party that ends Tremor. Recognize the allusion? It’s to the first line of Virginia Woolf’s novel: “Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.” Cole’s nod to classic modernism is unnecessary (and not entirely apposite) because from very early on readers of Tremor will realize that the novel’s pastiche form—non-linear narrative, shifting points of view including second, various stylistic registers, associative connections—demands assigned-reading concentration. Tremor is not, though, Woolfian stream of consciousness. Cole’s novel is more like the ever-changing chapters of a compact Ulysses—if the pedantic Stephen Dedalus were Black, had grown up in Lagos, did graduate study in Art History, became a photographer, taught at Harvard, and gave lectures on painting, old movies, earthquakes in Japan, Cuba, and Iran, pan-African music, colonial Massachusetts history, and Harvard’s guilt for slavery. Fear not. Weren’t some of the novels you most admire once required reading?

On a trip to Lagos, Tunde keeps seeing doubles, including a double of himself. Professor Cole and his Black protagonist, both photographers in their mid-40s, are presumably only partial doubles. The novel itself is like a split personality. Tunde is unhappy in a cold and death-haunted Massachusetts where he is obsessed with his mortality and a Black serial killer of women. In the novel’s other half, Tunde is invigorated by the heated and life-asserting (against high odds) Nigeria. If you’re familiar with Cole’s earlier novels—the rather intellectually remote New York-set Open City and the somewhat reportorial Lagos-set Every Day is for the Thief—you might think of Tremor as a mash-up of the two, better than both.

Despite its formal tinkering, Tremor is thematically a diaspora novel with familiar contrasts between former native land and current immigrant land turned way up because of Tunde’s education, position, and refined sensibility. In Boston, he feels alienated from his body and physical life. Cole spends many omniscient pages celebrating African music and its influence on Tunde’s body and soul. He can listen to recordings of that music in his Cambridge home, but has no access to the performance in which he participated during three ecstatic nights on a trip to Mali.

The depth and constancy of Tunde’s alienation may help explain why he so often criticizes America, its foreign policy in the novel’s present, its long history of slavery and, before that, Native American genocide. He does research in the Harvard archives, discovers facts readers are unlikely to know. Readers may find Tunde’s findings a revelation, and yet I think Cole suggests the frequency with which Tunde’s mind turns to American horror is to an extent symptomatic of something more profound than historical disquiet. The causality, of course, could go just the other way.

Now Woolf is apposite, for underneath the somewhat conventional diaspora fiction Cole has, I think, written a challenging psychological novel with tremors. Not the physical shaking of Woolf’s shell-shocked Septimus Smith. Oscillations rather than streams of consciousness, large chunks of disparate information instead of imagistic fragments for readers to see and possibly see through in ways that Tunde may not. At least, that’s what I hope Cole is up to. Otherwise, Tunde and some of Tremor could be insufferable—not because Tunde is imperceptive but because he is often repetitive and somewhat smug. In a lecture on paintings he gives at the Museum of Fine Arts, Tunde intends to discomfit his audience. He probably succeeds, but Cole risks alienating readers of Tremor by inserting a twenty-page lecture into a novel.

Another way to see Tremor, which begins and ends with Tunde trying to take and then taking a photograph in Boston, is through the example of Blind Spot, a collection of Cole’s photographs and accompanying single pages (usually) of his prose about them. Blind Spot is also a collage but even more hybrid than Tremor--the physicality of the images, the (by comparison) abstraction of language. A decade ago Cole experienced brief onsets of partial blindness that he three times gives to Tunde, once during the lecture just mentioned. Tunde can peer deeply into history and art and music, but he has figurative blind spots that give Tremor some of the complexity of its modernist predecessors.

Complexity of cultural influences and the mystery of personal emotions. In the last chapter of Tremor, Cole switches from his usual third-person narration to first-person for Tunde’s numerous meditations. After discussing his public life, Tunde says:

There is another reality, the personal one. And then there’s the secret one that is as dark as the blood beating in my veins, a cold river flowing undetected far from view, a place of uncertainty and premonition. Something is moving there that does not need me for its movement and that is taking me where I cannot imagine. A darkness to which the eyes can never become adjusted. Tremulus motion.

Much of Tremor is meditation rather than narrative, exposition and description and analysis rather than dialogue. Given the novel’s university setting, readers may be reminded of that Harvard graduate Emerson who said the ideal scholar was “Man thinking.” Tunde thinks and thinks and thinks, but does little to counteract the consequences of the historical racism he uncovers. Information about his teaching is perfunctory; we know nothing of his presumed publications or his planned photo exhibits; he doesn’t seem to be a member of any political groups. Unlike the first-person narrator of Open City, Tunde is not writing his story for others to read. These lacunae make me wonder if Cole is creating a not wholly sympathetic portrait of the artist in academia, implicitly contrasting the passive Tunde with someone like his real-life Black colleague Henry Louis Gates, who is both a thinker and an activist. Tremor is set in the period just before the earthquake of the Black Lives Matter demonstrations. I wonder what Tunde would have done.

What there is of plot in Tremor arises from the personal. In 2019, Tunde and his half Japanese, half African American wife Sadako are, after seventeen years together, temporarily separated—by Tunde’s travels, by Sadako’s choice. In the deep, almost private background is Tunde’s earlier homosexuality. He doesn’t make a connection between his critique of American plunder of African artifacts and his sacrifice of a gay existence for a conventional Cambridge life, but readers may.

Closer to the present, the novel frequently alludes to the death of Tunde’s best friend. In the present, the likely terminal illness of a colleague and friend troubles Tunde. Unlike Sadako, Tunde has no solace-giving family in the United States. Cole doesn’t provide much detail about the marriage, but at the end of Tremor there are the Dalloway party and the couple together in bed like Leopold and Molly Bloom. How long the couple’s love can meliorate Tunde’s many reasons to be angry is left open, another modernist trait.

Tunde and the novel feel liberated when Tremor switches from America to Mali and then to Lagos. In by far the longest chapter in the novel, Cole presents two- to three-page, mostly first-person anecdotes by or about a very wide range of Lagos residents—Christians and Muslims, merchants and musicians, prostitutes and schoolteachers, frauds and the homeless, the grieving and the leaving. One of these micro-characters is an artist painting murals under bridges. Like her, Cole weaves himself—but not really Tunde--“into the texture of the community’s life.”

At the end of this chapter, the host of a radio call-in program emerges as, perhaps, the source of the anecdotes and as a stand-in for the novelist who throws many voices in this part of Tremor. The host describes her voice:

Many things at once: young enough that they can call me by my first name, mature enough that they can confide their heartaches to me, seductive enough that they feel included in the game of intimacy, innocent enough to stay within broadcasting rules, feminine enough that it fits men’s idea of a beautiful woman, strong enough that women can sense that I am no pushover. And then there are their own voices. Four nights a week I find myself inside this forest of accents and I absolutely love it.

Not to press the Ulysses comparison too far, but Cole’s Lagos material here and in the next chapter is like the Leopold Bloom social and sensual side of Joyce’s novel. For all of its vitality, though, Lagos is not a place where Tunde can live. Why not, in modernist fashion, is left to the reader to speculate.

Discussing his photographs, Tunde says he looks at an image in his digital camera, looks again when it is uploaded to his computer, looks again when it is printed, looks again in relation to other images. I was going to say that Tremor requires us to look again, but I think it’s more accurate to say the novel allows us to read it again and encourages us to think again about the relationship of the personal and the political, a relationship that Cole implies is vibratory, shifting back and forth, perhaps uncontrollable, possibly unknowable.

I found no reasons in the novels I mentioned at the outset to read them a second time. I have now read Tremor twice and will read it again when I see what other reviewers make of it. Most contemporary novels are not designed to be read carefully even once, so Tremor is an anomalous treat for a reviewer, at least for one who enjoys a challenge. I even think of it as a gift. Tunde buys a hand-carved antelope headdress at the novel’s beginning. Tremor is like an artifact—recognizably real but also ambiguous--painstakingly carved out of Cole’s experiences of life and art and art about life. Tunde believes that life “is hopeless but it is not serious.” He’s wrong. Teju Cole is a serious man who takes seriously his medium and his readers. What a pleasure.

Tom LeClair is the author of four books of literary criticism.