Every Day Is for the Thief by Teju Cole (review)

Readers of Every Day Is for the Thief by Nigerian American writer Teju Cole will recognize continuities between the narrator of this debut novel and Julius, protagonist of the author’s acclaimed second effort, Open City (2011). Both are young men with home ties to Nigeria and the United States; both study psychiatry; both meditate incisively on urban spaces as social petri dishes, teeming with wonder and barely contained horrors. The narrator of Every Day reflects, “In Nigeria we experience all the good things that texture a life, but always with a sense of foreboding, a sense of the fragility of things” (113). Originally published in the Nigerian capital of Abuja, Every Day was reissued in 2014 by Random House, the publisher of Open City in the United States, symbolically connecting the two nations yet again.

Every Day is a generic hybrid, just as the narrator is half-black on his father’s side and half-”pale colour[ed]” on his mother’s (96). This slender volume combines fiction with philosophical treatise, travelogue, journal, photo album, and personal essay. The plot is sparse and episodic: a psychiatry fellow from New York returns to the bustling mega-city of Lagos after an absence of fifteen years. He stays with middle-class relatives in a home he describes as “this great house in Africa,” one that winks nightly with blackouts and faces the perpetual threat of armed robbery (23). This scenario is a microcosm of life in the city; constant vigilance is a must. The bulk of the chapters emanates from the narrator’s “aimless wandering” (98), and, like the nineteenth-century European flâneurs, he harbors a deep aesthetic connection to his surroundings.

Much of the goings-on prove off-putting but intellectually fruitful; local markets, chain restaurants, and internet cafés all provoke his acerbic social critiques. He dissects what he sees as a culture of secrecy and denial, much like a piece of flashy designer clothing that is actually a knock-off, fraying on the inside and painfully tight. While no true stranger, having grown up in the city, he finds himself shocked by everyday absurdities (for instance, the tear-gassing of peacefully protesting mothers by police after a fatal plane accident). He is also emotionally addled. His father’s death by tuberculosis, as revealed later, exacerbated the already tenuous relationship between the young man and his mother. She, like her son, now lives in the United States, but they have yet to reconnect.

The text’s procession of characters in Lagos—among them a mysterious woman reader on the bus, a childhood friend stained by family tragedy, and a law clerk naively seeking his American dream—is as bright and fleeting as lit matches. Like smoke, a near-dysthymic sense of foreboding permeates the text; it turns acrid when the speaker confronts the unemployed “area boys” who hustle for a payout, or the online scammers (the “yahoo yahoos”) that “mangl[e] what little good name their country still has” (27). Lagos is a “patronage society” (19), our guide reminds us, a massive engine lubricated by bribes, extortion, “gifts,” and other slippery forms of opportunism that often double as the only means of survival in a national economy of growing wealth but increasing poverty. He vows to leave—”I can no longer bear the violation, the caprice, the air of desperation” (87)—yet slumps back reluctantly, ready to diagnose the sick body anew.

This ambivalence epitomizes a kind of diasporic double-consciousness. The young man is a part of Nigerian society by dint of having grown up there (he left Lagos in the 1990s), but his allegiances lie more strongly with his adopted intellectual homelands, the United States and parts of Western Europe. For instance, after visiting the Nigerian National Museum (a profound disappointment), he ambles over to the Musical Society of Nigeria. Here, it is clear to see what determines his standards, his sense of familiarity; in one telling instance, he seems to morph into a crusty mouthpiece for...