Who Needs Plot?

Teju Cole, who visits Friday, Feb. 10, discards plot in his acclaimed first novel Open City, and the critics don't miss it.

Here's John Knight of The Millions:

“Every work begins as an obvious metaphor,” John Berger writes. “The metaphor allows [the artist] to imagine the familiar world from above, and his own liberation from it.” Most novels move beyond metaphor toward something resembling a plot; Teju Cole’s Open City (out this week in paperback) does not. Rather, it is itself a single metaphor: aimless wandering as a reading experience. More.