At first blush, Teju Cole’s new novel, Tremor, seems like autofiction. The story follows Tunde, who, like Cole, is a Nigerian-American Harvard professor and photographer in his forties. As in his celebrated novels Every Day is for the Thief (2007) and Open City (2011), Cole tracks his alter ego’s inner life as he moves through daily routines and chance encounters. Tunde clocks but doesn’t linger over everyday racism. He collects the death notices of colleagues. His wandering mind alights again and again on certain topics—the “catalog of horrors” of colonial history, the fraying edges of his marriage, an unrelenting grief for a dead friend.
“We are our habits in sum,” Cole writes in his first book of essays, Known and Strange Things (2016). It’s an apt description for his approach to fiction, too. Cole’s novels work by steady addition — habit upon habit, moment by moment — until they achieve fully realized portraits. In Open City, writes James Wood, “Cole has made his novel as close to a diary as a novel can get.” Tremor still feels like portraiture, but it is no diary. Instead, it opens in the third person: “The leaves are glossy and dark and from the dying blooms rises a fragrance that might be jasmine. He sets up the tripod and begins to focus the camera.” Cole first aligns our sightline with Tunde’s, then pulls our frame back beyond his. It’s the first hint that Cole, once on the front line of the autofiction boom, is up to something new here.
The novel’s first act proceeds with all the pleasures of Cole’s established style. It is episodic, digressive, and unhurried by the usual demands of plot. Tunde makes photographs, teaches classes, and travels in New England, Europe, and Nigeria. A recurring concern is art and ownership. In a Maine antiques shop, Tunde sees a Bambara ci wara headdress “among the unrelated treasures white people had collected by fair means or foul from across the globe.” After two pages of pondering the mask—what makes it authentic or not, how its provenance affects its valuation, whether he should “rescue” it—his spouse insists that they buy it. Tunde “wants to bring it closer to home, closer to his own home where it can be seen by kinder eyes, by eyes that place authenticity elsewhere.”
One of Cole’s best qualities as a writer is his evident passion for his favorite subjects. He packs his pages with reflections—sometimes fleeting, sometimes expansive—on art history, film, literature, music, and photography. You don’t need to share his particular obsessions to gain from these passages. Consider, for example, Tunde’s reflection on an especially esoteric subject: a deceased Micronesian sailor named Pius Mau Piailug, “one of the few custodians, perhaps the only one, of an area of ancient knowledge: the art of navigating across vast waters without the aid of modern instruments.” At length, Tunde marvels at Mau’s rare understanding of the natural world. Cole then steps back to view Tunde’s fascination itself:
“Tunde is not conscious of having any particular interest in marine navigation or perilous adventure. And yet when he thinks about Mau he wants to change his own life. […] His admiration for Mau is a chart he constructed from the clues in that single obituary, the memory of which fills him with the simple wish to be more in tune with the equivalents in his own life of the rising and falling of the waves, the flights of birds, the smell of the air. He wants to take in what is useful from the world not in order to plunder it but in order to live.”
Mau’s knowledge is not Tunde’s, just as Cole’s is not ours. But in these pages, the arcane becomes essential. It prompts introspection (What are my life-affirming “equivalents”? What are yours?). And it offers a chance to share in Cole’s abiding, contagious curiosity, as well as his deep reverence for others.
At times, Cole’s portrait of the cultured professor tips over into caricature: “Often when he is entertained by music he is also displeased by having been entertained, as though he had forgotten something or gotten something wrong, as though he has let someone down.” Soon, though, Cole stages scenes that bring Tunde out of his own head. At a Paris street vendor’s stall, Tunde tries to compose a photograph of trinkets for sale. He’s fully absorbed—thinking of another photographer’s memorable photograph that he wants to emulate, working against the limitations of his phone’s camera, taking several shots. And then someone grabs his arm. It’s one of the street vendors, a furious Black man, shouting at Tunde, first demanding that he delete the photos, then demanding the phone itself.
Tunde is deeply shaken. “He sees these men as brothers.” Now he must confront the truth that this man, in his precarious economic position, sees Tunde as “nothing but a class enemy.” Pulled from Tunde’s stream of consciousness, we see him as the street vendor does:
“Tunde hadn’t bought anything, hadn’t asked for permission, hadn’t paid for the right, hadn’t even considered doing so. Here was a stranger who had simply looked past him and taken something, the way the wealthy take what belongs to others and then act surprised when they are challenged. Taking. That’s what those who are well-off do. They take and take and take.”
And so Tremor begins a decisive move out of autofiction’s solipsistic groove. Cole now introduces a series of stylistic ruptures. First we lose access to Tunde’s interiority, instead only receiving his words (an invited lecture delivered in incendiary fashion, a real showstopper of a chapter). Then, in a triumphant break, Cole leaves Tunde behind altogether in order to hopscotch among other peoples’ inner lives. In a series of 24 disconnected vignettes, a completely new cast of new characters—all Nigerians in Lagos—tell their stories.
A driver observes his boss’s habits and the distance between their lives. An exhausted woman fights her brother in court to claim her share of an inheritance. A bereaved mother prepares her daughter’s body for her funeral. A church musician thinks about the transcendent experience of improvising at the organ, filling the space with his music. This musician wonders about others, too: “Imagine yourself out in the city, maybe sitting in traffic and observing everyone around you. What are these people thinking about?” In one compact monologue after another, these narrators tell us what they’re thinking about—trials and joys that are by turns banal and momentous. Instead of seeing these people from afar, through Tunde’s thoughts, Cole is here doing “cartography,” as he says, “on a scale of 1:1.”
Tremor is Cole’s finest novel yet. It reminds us of the best qualities of intensely personal, diaristic fiction. And it boldly moves beyond the limits of that form. After so many chapters—and really, so many books—of Cole’s distinctive narration, Tremor‘s chorus of voices offers a recalibration. When we ultimately return to Tunde for an excellent, poignant final act, his story reads differently. It no longer feels like the main event. His story, like each of ours, is one among the many.
[Published by Random House on October 17, 2023, 239 pages, $28.00 hardcover]