Taylor Antrim is fiction critic for The Daily Beast and the author of the novel The Headmaster Ritual.
Want to write a breakout first novel? The conventional wisdom says ingratiate yourself (Everything Is Illuminated), grab the reader by the lapels (The Lovely Bones), or put on an antic show (Special Topics in Calamity Physics). Teju Cole's disquietingly powerful debut Open City does none of the above. It's light on plot. It's exquisitely written, but quiet; the sentences don't call attention to themselves.
The narrator, a Nigerian psychiatry student, is emotionally distant, ruminative, and intellectual. His account of a year spent walking around New York, encountering immigrants of all kinds, listening to their stories and recalling his own African boyhood, achieves its resonance obliquely, through inference—meaning you have to pay attention. But Open City is worth the effort.
In its patient, cumulative way, the novel paints a startlingly dim picture of our present moment, our age of permeable borders and teeming heterogeneous cities. Julius looks like the bright side of globalism—born in Africa to a German mother and Nigerian father, educated in New York, now one year from his medical degree—but he feels off-step, adrift. The closer he looks at the world around him, the more callousness and anomie he finds—qualities the reader can't help but see, as the novel proceeds, in Julius himself.
At the start of the book, the fall of 2006, Julius has begun taking long walks through Manhattan as a kind of therapy, a way to shake off the stress of his days at the hospital. He walks from Morningside Park, through Columbus Circle, down to Wall Street and up the West Side Highway, itineraries that feel both aimless and bracingly observed. He'll enter the park at 72nd Street, emerge at Fifth and Central Park South, and visit the American Folk Art Museum, taking in an exhibition of paintings by John Brewster. He'll ride the No. 2 train, transfer to the 1, and notice a man reading Octavia Butler's Kindred, and another reading The Wall Street Journal. He'll describe a bank of stationary cyclists in the window of a New York Sports Club, then the same again in an Equinox. He'll patiently circle Trinity Church near Wall Street looking for a way in, reading inscriptions on gravestones and monuments.
Julius' wanderings magnify New York and make it feel like a city encountered for the first time—though he has lived there for years. Meanwhile, the character's inner life is equally peripatetic, moving from migrations of birds (a recurring theme) to St. Augustine, to the symphonies of Mahler, to the city's bedbug epidemic, to the work of Melville and Nabokov. These early pages bring to mind W.G. Sebold's erudite walking-tour novels and deliver a sense, as with Sebold's characters, that Julius has some absence to fill, a personal history to recover.
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