I’d been meaning to read Open City since it came out in 2011; I’m not sure why it took me so long to get around to it. Reading this in 2021 was interesting: we’re nearly two decades on from 9/11 now, and lines about disaster and epidemics have a different resonance, after 2020: at one point the narrator thinks about how “We are the first humans who are completely unprepared for disaster. It is dangerous to live an a secure world”; shortly after that, talking about epidemics in Europe in centuries past, he says this: “What could it mean to live with such a possibility, with people of all ages dropping dead around you all the time? The thing is that we have no idea” (pp 200-201).
The prose style of Open City is slightly distancing; the matter-of-fact way that the narrator, Julius, talks about his daily activities and memories keeps the reader at arm’s length: his tone is measured, whether he’s talking about his estranged mother or his dead father or a patient (he’s in the last year of a psychiatry fellowship) or a museum he’s visited. But that measured style has a fluidity, too, and the pacing of the book’s sentences feels like the pace of walking, of Julius’s walks through New York City (where he lives) and Brussels (which he visits). I finished reading the book several days ago, and there are parts of it that are still very much in my head: Julius’s visit to the American Folk Art Museum (in its old 53rd St. location) and how it feels to be in a museum and lose track of time, or the different kind of slippery relationship to time the narrative seems to have when Julius gets his shoes shined and the Haitian bootblack is apparently talking about being in the city during the yellow fever epidemic (which, though he doesn’t mention it, was in the late 1700s/early 1800s). (Or maybe Julius is imagining that story, imagining the story of a Black man’s arrival in the city hundreds of years before he arrived from Nigeria, hundreds of years before the Liberian man he talks to when he visits a Queens detention center with his (now-ex) girlfriend’s church group.) Elsewhere in the book, Julius considers the city’s past, the layers of history and the city’s connections to slavery: the African Burial Ground downtown amidst office buildings, the Customs House; Bowling Green.
I like the parts of this book where Julius is walking and thinking, like this, from early in the book, when he’s talking about the experience of his New York walks: “Each neighborhood of the city appeared to be made of a different substance, each seemed to have a different air pressure, a different psychic weight: the bright lights and shuttered shops, the housing projects and luxury hotels, the fire escapes and city parks” (pp 6-7). And this, too: “Every decision—where to turn left, how long to remain lost in thought in front of an abandoned building, whether to watch the sun set over New Jersey, or to lope in the shadows on the East Side, looking across to Queens—was inconsequential, and was for that reason a reminder of freedom” (p 7). I also love that the city Julius is walking through is my city, that I was here when the Folk Art Museum was next to MoMA, when the Time Warner Center had just opened, when Tower Records closed. I think this will be a book to reread, and I’m curious what different things I’ll notice when I do: there’s a lot going on in this novel, in satisfying and subtle ways.
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