I meant to read Teju Cole’s extraordinary Open City very slowly, savoring every chapter, but I wasn’t strong enough to hold back; I couldn’t think about anything else. This might seem to be an odd claim to make for a book in which excitements of any kind are deeply banked — a book that on its surface is an account, in twenty-one chapters, of walks and conversations in Manhattan and Brussels. (Actually, two to of the chapters are set in the author’s native Nigeria.) Nothing conventionally remarkable happens, and it is hard to imagine that anyone without an advanced degree (or well on the way to earning one) will enjoy this book. Ah, but that’s the point: people with advanced degrees will find Julius
arresting, because although he is the son of a Nigerian engineer and a German mother (herself conceived during the fall of Berlin), Julius can in no reasonable light be regarded as an outsider. 

When Julius goes to Carnegie Hall to hear Sir Simon Rattle lead the Berlin Philharmonic in a performance of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony, he sits in a high seat not because he can’t afford a better one but because he has bought his ticket at the last minute; he has been busy setting up his first office as a psychiatrist. Julius is as knowledgeable about the music as almost anyone else in the hall, but if he is at home, he is at home alone. He cannot help noticing: “Almost everyone, as at most such concerts, was white.” Julius is neither black nor white, but his skin is dark, and “standing in line for the bathroom during intermission, I get looks that make me feel like Ota Benga, the Mbuti man who was put on display in the Monkey House at the Bronx Zoo in 1906.” This is a feeling that would abate, one presumes, if more black young men showed up to hear Mahler at Carnegie Hall. 

It occurred to me to call Open City a “wrought memoir,” as in wrought iron. It’s not so much that Julius seems to be a stand-in for Cole as that the nub of his experience corresponds exactly to his creator’s: sharing the same parentage, Julius has settled into a professional life in New York City. (Teju Cole is an art historian.) When he is not on duty as a psychiatrict resident at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital (as we still call it, whatever it’s proper name is now), Julius takes long walks through the city, walks that Cole must have taken as well, in order to describe them so well. Perhaps different things happened to Cole on these walks. Maybe, for example, he didn’t see The Last King of Scotland alone, but went with friends. Maybe he went to Brussels — this is Cole I’m talking about — to do some professional research, and not to look for his grandmother. (Maybe he knows where his German grandmother is.) It doesn’t really matter, because the sensibility that Julius displays in his luminous prose is that of a man whose one singular gift is the ability to write very well.

New York is crawling with psychiatrists who go to Mahler concerts. (It used to be, anyway.) There is nothing unusual, in this city, about people who take long rambles through unfamiliar neighborhoods. People come from all over the world (including the mainland United States) to live the kind of life that Julius has made for himself. But I can’t think of any who know how to serve up that life in a way that’s at the same time  convincing (and, to me, familiar) and compelling. 

Although Open City works as a novel — there is a devastating development in the penultimate chapter that would be much less forceful if read out of context — it will probably be appreciated as a sequence of compositions, like the movements of a serenade. I don’t want to belabor the comparison to music, but I drew a great deal of pleasure from I came to regard as Cole’s contrapuntal handling of different (and therefore contrasting) motifs in the later chapters. There are usually two: in one of my favorites, Sixteen, an outing from Morningside Heights (where Julius lives) to Chinatown is bracketed by death. At the beginning, Julius learns of the death of an aged mentor. At the end, a dirge-like melody played by a passing band reminds him of morning assemblies at high school in Nigeria. The chapter ends in what can only be called a pearl: 

To be alive, it seemed to me, as I stood there in all kinds of sorrow, was to be both original and reflection, and to be dead was to be split off, to be reflection alone. 

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 2nd, 2011 at 6:00 pm.