When I was a young writer starting out, I read The Writer’s Journey by Christopher Vogler, which made a significant impression on me. Based on the work of Karl Jung and Joseph Campbell, the book suggests that all stories derive from what it calls the Hero’s Journey, a kind of ancient training for young men, who will soon have to leave the camp fire and venture forth in search of resources, territory and discovery. This idea seemed compelling to me. In fact, once you see the journey laid out in its various traditional stages, it’s difficult to unsee.

Early on in his book, Vogler describes some objections to the idea of the Hero’s Journey. One of these is the suggestion that it is unsuited to the experience of women, who are perhaps less likely than men to move between one external goal and another in a linear way. Marilynne Robinson’s novel Housekeeping might serve as an illustration of this objection, because apparently it’s about staying home in a women-only household. How will a story work in that scenario?

Fittingly, we start with an accident that gets rid of a man. Edmund Foster lives in the remote town of Fingerbone, Idaho, a restless soul, who takes a job working on the railways. He dies when his train crashes from a bridge into the vast lake beside Fingerbone. With male influence removed at this early stage, direction seems to disappear from the lives of the wife and three daughters he leaves behind.

‘With him gone, they were cut free from the troublesome possibility of success, recognition, advancement. They had no reason to look forward, nothing to regret. Their lives spun off the tilting world like thread off a spindle, breakfast time, supper time, lilac time, apple time.’

With men out of the picture, the story confines itself to home and domesticity. However, we are not in the situation suggested by Christopher Vogler of female-being opposed to male-doing. Sylvia Foster, might lose her sense of direction after the death of her husband, but she also demonstrates that men don’t have a monopoly on seeing life in simplistic journey terms.

‘… she conceived of life as a road down which one travelled, an easy enough road through a broad country, and that one’s destination was there from the very beginning,’

Sylvia, after a few years of routine, man-free housekeeping, finds that her three daughters leave home. After a few more years, middle girl, Helen returns to Fingerbone with two daughters, Lucille, and Ruth – the story’s narrator. But Helen only drops off the girls at grandma’s house, before promptly committing suicide by driving into the lake, leaving Sylvia to look after her granddaughters. When Sylvia herself dies, Lucille and Ruth are looked after first by Sylvia’s stick-in-the-mud sisters-in-law, and then by her youngest daughter Sylvie, who returns to Fingerbone after living a rootless, hobo life, drifting around America.

We now seem to be asked a question – is life drifting from day to day at home in Fingerbone, really any different from an itinerant life, wandering from town to town by jumping on freight trains? Neither has any sense of direction. Sylvie is a ‘transient’ who never really settles in Fingerbone. Nevertheless, it is repeatedly made clear that Fingerbone is itself transient, a town that floods yearly, burns down occasionally, prey to all kinds of natural and economic hazards, enduring only due to the inertia of its unadventurous residents.

So, going back to the Hero’s Journey idea, in Housekeeping the experience of women who stay home overlaps with that of those who wander on endless journeys. I’m reminded of a song that was in the charts the week I myself left home, to go to university – Paul Young’s version of Wherever I Lay My Hat (That’s My Home).

I don’t know if Marilynne Robinson wrote this book to take on Joseph Campbell and his Hero idea. But in her essay collection, When I was a Child I Read Books, she does refer to Joseph Campbell, saying his scholarship ‘does not bear scrutiny.’ After reading Housekeeping it’s difficult to see much difference between getting out there and staying home. Both are equally non-linear experiences. This is a denial of the Hero’s Journey – though ironically, it could also be something of an ironic confirmation of its relevance. After all, Housekeeping is another book about journeys, even if they are contradictory, enigmatic, with a sense of being rather than doing.

Housekeeping was published in 1980, winning the PEN/Hemingway Award for best first novel, and now makes regular appearances on best novel lists.

Open City is a novel by Teju Cole, published in 2011.

I didn’t know what to expect when I borrowed Open City from the library. I’d discovered that Teju Cole was, amongst other things, a writing professor at Harvard. What would a book by a Harvard writing professor look like? Fancy, I thought. Would it be the kind of fancy that makes the reader feel fancy too, or the kind that makes them feel inadequate?

I started reading. Julius is a young doctor working in a New York psychiatric hospital. He has recently split up with his girlfriend. When off duty he listens to classical music, reads high-end literature, or goes for long walks in the streets of New York, visiting cultural sites. His mind drifts over his German/Nigerian childhood. He takes a holiday in Belgium with the vague hope of finding a lost grandmother. Returning to New York, he wanders round some more, gets mugged, learns something dark about his past, and goes to a concert.

Open City is not driven by plot – clearly. Instead it’s a book of thoughts and ideas, with its central preoccupation being identity. As a man who is part Nigerian, part German, Julius seems to be looking for a place in the world.

The book defines identity in all kinds of ways – by race, ethnic group, religion, age, even by the particular illnesses an individual might suffer. Actually, you could also define identity by the books you read. If reviews on Goodreads are anything to go by, people who like Teju Cole’s Open City form their own little tribe, cutting across international borders. This is one of a huge overlapping Venn diagram of identities. I put myself in the Open City admirers group. Others may not feel it’s a place for them, preferring cosy crime maybe. But then again, there will almost certainly be Open City readers and cosy crime readers who share the experience of having, for example, eczema. This is a book where we are all divided in some ways, while overlapping in others. I would suggest giving Open City a chance. It’s clever, but not in a way designed to make readers feel small. Yes there’s name dropping of European authors, and attendance at performances of Mahler symphonies given by the Berlin Philharmonic under Simon Rattle. But even if this is not apparently your thing, I think you will still find some common ground somewhere in Open City.

One last point. I enjoyed the way Cole set the story at a time when the world of books is changing. Julius goes to bookshops just before they go out of business – record shops too. This is the moment when the old analogue culture moves to digital. This shift serves to break up human contact, ending the physical experience of going to a shop with other people. There is a definite sense of loss. At the same time, there are new potentials for communication. Back in the heyday of bookshops this review would never have been written. I would have had to leave it to someone working for the Times Literary Supplement or The Guardian. Now anyone can put their review of Open City out there, and look to overlap with someone else’s literary Venn diagram.

My advice would be to consider joining the Open City tribe. In fact, in one way or another, you’re already a member

The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood, published in 2000, won the Booker Prize for that year. Set in Canada, mostly in the 1930s and 1940s, it tells the story of the Chase family who made a fortune manufacturing buttons. The 1930s sees the button market in a precarious state. Norvel Chase, the company director, a well meaning but traumatised war veteran, makes a last desperate effort to save his family from financial ruin. He persuades his eldest daughter, Iris, to marry a wealthy and, as it turns out, deeply unsavoury, Toronto businessman. The consequences of this ill advised plan become the subject of the rest of the book, as told by Iris in her old age.

Iris tells her story, in a kind of top layer to the book. She also describes writing a book about her experience – a second layer. And within her book there’s a further story – a sci-fi tale written by Iris’s boyfriend who makes a living submitting material to pulp magazines. The resulting Russian doll of a novel suggests ambitions to comment on the nature of storytelling. It isn’t the most straightforward of reads, but neither is it as precious as it might sound from this description. According to The Blind Assassin, writing is often a less-than-heroic business, misleading, prone to exaggeration or simplification, distasteful, silly, whether we are talking about pulp sci-fi, or Virgil’s Aeneid, which through the eyes of Iris appears as a violent melodrama.

With all that said, fiction is still credited with special powers in revealing truths. Iris is able to say things in fiction that are impossible to say in her real life.

This book is a mixture, sometimes an uneasy one, of the literary and the low-brow. It’s knowing and arch – unable to fully commit to a straightforward story because it wants to remain above such things. The author holds the story at a distance, which also describes the experience of reading it. The Blind Assassin is undoubtedly interesting, but maybe more interesting than enjoyable – easier to admire than to love