Review of Sean Thomas Dougherty’s The Blue City

Review of Sean Thomas Dougherty’s The Blue City

By Susannah Nichols



The Blue City, Sean Thomas Dougherty’s experimental novella, opens with an urban man at work: “In the blue city, in the dawn-scraped awakening, Tomas the fish-monger is already stacking the day’s catch in the fish stalls of the great Cathedral-skyed market. Tomas wears the shawl of the blue city.”

The Blue City sounds like a euphemism—a tour of various locales that blend the old and the new, the fantastic and the actual, the good and the evil. A reader might sense that she could parallel the Blue City to Istanbul or Prague or Budapest, or apply those cities to the realms of other chapters, with titles like “The Red City,” “In the City of the Bare Bulb,” “The City of a Hundred Angers,” “The Black City.”

But Tomas is no ordinary protagonist, and the walk we take with enigmatic narrator Josef is no ordinary journey. The Blue City isn’t a travelogue but rather a thoughtful meander through the geography of self. Josef forces us to confront innocence, freedom, opportunity, fear, and honesty within these locales. “This is where childhood stutters and sings,” he tells us of the Black City.

Josef’s mission throughout the book is to face what he has done, but Dougherty’s language compels the reader to consider that concept on a much larger scale—my journey, Josef seems to be telling us, is secondary to yours. This message hits hardest in “The City of Broken Noses,” when Josef urges us to be careful in our assumptions of other people. “It is the home for the imperfect,” he tells us, “for the gesture that seems to spell out what is failed. But does it? What can one perform if perfect?” Josef gives the description of the residents of this city, but it’s up to us to decide whether to be intuitive observers or ogling tourists.

A practical reason the reader stays with himself rather than with the characters of this story is that the characters are distant, often downright cryptic, and the actual plot of the story is rather disorienting. Tomas, Josef, and the heartfelt Marta are involved in a complicated triangle of friendship, exploitation, lust, secrets, redemption, and growth. The particulars of both character and action are alluded to rather than specified, and the perspective jarringly shifts, giving us an unstable sense of time and place within the story. But this instability isn’t necessarily problematic. This is, after all, an experimental novella.

What Dougherty omits in linear plot structure and conventional character development is more than made up for in the overall mood he creates. His philosophical truisms and physical descriptions have a lyrical loveliness that makes you want to swim in his language for as long as possible. His sentences have been meticulously crafted and culled to their most powerful elements, but he doesn’t draw attention to his craft. He writes like the seasoned athlete who makes even the most arduous maneuvers look effortless.

The Blue City won’t provide its readers with an easy-to-use map or accessible tourist attractions. But travelers who are willing to look in a stranger’s eyes, willing to wander down a seedy street, and willing to feel before analyzing may find something deeply satisfying in Dougherty’s landscape.


Susannah Nichols teaches English at Roeper School in Birmingham, MI
and is currently working on her first novel.