Teju Cole, 48, is the author of eight books, including the essay collection Black Paper: Writing in a Dark Time, and Blind Spot, a mix of text and photos he took from around the world. In 2012 he won the PEN/Hemingway award for debuts with his first novel, Open City, in which a psychiatrist wanders post-9/11 Manhattan. Praising its subtlety, the New Yorker called it “as close to a diary as a novel can get… what moves the prose forward is not event or contrivance but a steady, accidental inquiry”. His new novel, Tremor, puts us in the mind of an art history lecturer in the weeks before the pandemic. Cole, born in Michigan and raised in Lagos, spoke from Cambridge, Massachusetts, where since 2018 he has been teaching at Harvard.
Where did this book begin?
After Open City, I’d been able to pursue my intellectual interests without making a novel, which wasn’t dissatisfying to me; I was thrilled by the opportunity to have done a lot of thinking with essays and to figure some things out about how words and images sit next to each other in fictional or nonfictional forms. But I knew that when the time was right, I’d want to write another novel. By the summer of 2020, one of the creative ideas motivating me was to capture the moment just before the pandemic. People I knew – or knew of – were dying every week. One of the ways mortality registered for me was wanting to better address what it means to live – to have the multiplicity of life itself be the riposte to death.
What draws you to write fiction propelled by thought, not plot?
I just really wanted to say that this is what the mountain range of the mind feels like: “I’m this, this, this and this, in terms of my experiences, thoughts, sorrows, loves, joys.” But a novel isn’t about its summary; it’s about being inside the flow of what’s happening, its texture.
Tremor’s viewpoint sometimes shifts abruptly, not least in a section that cuts between 21 voices without any kind of framing. Why did you want to write something so formally unsettling?
“Experimental” isn’t quite the right word – I write perfectly lucid sentences – but I wanted to give myself a chance to make something that could fail. I don’t know that people are doing enough with their freedom as writers – to keep doing this 19th-century thing bores me.
Your protagonist thinks about slavery, Nazi plunder and the serial killer Samuel Little, among many other subjects, but he also likes a good night out. Did you worry his lifestyle of travel and partying might rub some readers up wrong the way?
It’s the kind of thing that could make a reader grouchy. People wrote to me after Open City and said: “How could you write that book? We were so close to this character, and [after a late revelation] he turns out to be terrible.” Tremor takes a different kind of risk: “Oh, you travel all over the world and go out dancing?” It’s harder to write, because I think our instinct is to judge that. “You go to bars? Have a good time? Nice for some! I thought you were a politically alert creature who cared about the fate of the world.” Being honest about happiness is hard if you’re intellectually serious. Not to criticise Rachel Cusk, but if she wrote the party scene [in Tremor], there’d be withering assessments of everyone there: that [guest] looks like a frog, that one is divorced and pathetic and so on. But seriousness can just be moroseness and Open City was plenty morose.
So were you consciously departing from the tone of that novel?
When I was younger, I had depression – not very much lately – and while the person I was then could have imagined writing Open City, I could not have imagined writing Tremor, for the extent that it’s about the measure of joy that there is in being alive. It gets my hackles up a little bit when I read that it’s “about racism and indigeneity in Massachusetts” – if you’re perceived as a black subject, there’s a huge temptation and pressure to turn yourself into a walking placard for historical wrongs. It so happens that I am interested in how history is terrible, but I’m also interested in not having that be the only thing that gets narrated.
What have you been reading lately?
I’ve been immersed in Greek tragedy – speaking of happiness – because of a piece I wrote about the performance of Greek tragedies in Greece and how that has been interweaving with some contemporary disasters. Otherwise, it’s been poetry: To 2040 by Jorie Graham, Saskia Hamilton’s All Souls and the last volume by Adam Zagajewski are the last three things I’ve bought. If there’s a new novel, it’s a fair bet I haven’t read it. I sometimes think I might’ve gotten to Open City probably around 2015 or so if I hadn’t been the one who wrote it. Sometimes you just need the noise to die down; the book waits for you.
Was there a novel that first inspired you to write?
I read The Old Man and the Sea when I was 20 and actually cried out when the sharks showed up; I’d never been ambushed by a book before. Something about that made me think for the first time that a book is something written by somebody that then detonates in somebody else’s hand far removed in time. Later there was an encounter with Joyce. I got the idea that literature had to be ever more difficult; not “let’s try to figure out how to write Dubliners”, but “we have to figure out what comes after Finnegans Wake”. I wrote rubbish for eight years. Sometime in my late 20s I realised – I mean, it’s obvious in retrospect – that what I wanted was the maximal complexity of thinking in the clearest language that would support that thinking. Being avant garde isn’t about being unreadable.
• Tremor is published on 19 October by Faber (£18.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
