The four dimensions of literary narrative : Open City

Reading Teju Cole's debut novel, "Open City," makes me think about narrative styles or what I'll call for the moment narrative dimensions. Most novels involve a plot that is for the most part linear - moves from point a to point b in time and often in place: a day in the life in one city (Ulysses), a journey from one point to another (The Odyssey) - even though these narratives sometimes are told out of sequence - we build the linearity in our minds a we read and when we complete the novel. What makes a narrative into a novel is generally the inter-relations among the parts of the narrative; the narrative is not only a straight line but also a geometrical construct: 2 dimensions (relations among the characters, much like a family tree), three dimensions (interactions among the character or between characters and the protagonist); 4 dimensions (character and their relations to one another are dynamic and change or evolve over time). Cole willfully breaks with many of these conventions. His narrative is relentlessly one-dimensional: a line, following one character, the narrator, Julius, from point A to B through time. The characters and the episodes have astonishingly little inter-relation. For example, in the first chapter a key moment is Julius's visit to his aging mentor professor, and we learn something of the professor's past as a Japanese-American held prisoner during WWII. We would expect, as experienced readers, that this man would play a large role in the book, but except for one (I think) passing reference he does not appear again - at least through the first 2/3rds. This is typical of Cole's style and technique - random characters are introduced, but he willfully makes no further use of these characters. None of this is necessarily bad or wrong, but it makes Cole's book frustrating at times and, at the same time, establishes his narrator, Julius, as an extremely lonely, isolated man. More on this later.