Readable Avant-Gardism

 Born and bred in Indiana, I have no more idea of the avant-garde than I do of climbing mountains. When I see magazines asking for experimental works, I think they cannot be including me. I think my stuff is experimental only in the sense I have no idea what I am doing. There is also a sense I have of the “normal” realistic novel just not being enough. I know how much baggage I carry in my head – from the narrowly personal to the wider cultural to ideas picked up on the road that I do not know how to convey in a novel when the example is, say, Theodore Dreiser or William Faulkner or John Updike. 

What I see touted as experimental does not always seem to be communicative to me. These stories seem to me like jazz that is more interested in showing off its chops than being listenable.

Then along comes The Guardian's interview of Teju Cole, Teju Cole: ‘Being avant garde isn’t about being unreadable’ to make think and feel a bit better about being from Indiana.

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.

I think I got the idea from Milan Kundera (about 40 years too late to really useful) that the novel can be whatever life is. Now, I need to get to work.

sch 10/15