Open City

Teju Cole’s first full-length novel, Open City was published in 2011 to widespread acclaim, winning the PEN/Hemingway Award, The New York City Book Award, and the Rosenthal Foundation Award. Open City made many lists of the best books of the year, including at the New York Times Book Review, the Los Angeles Times, and NPR. Cole was born in Kalamazoo, Michigan to Nigerian parents and spent most of his childhood in Lagos, Nigeria before returning to Michigan at seventeen to attend college, first at Western Michigan University and then at Kalamazoo College. He draws upon his multinational experience in creating the character of Julius, the narrator of Open City.

Open City is a work of literary fiction set in both New York City and Brussels. The narrator, as he walks around the streets of these cities, recalls events from his past in Nigeria, as well as the time he has spent living in America. The walks are a break from his last year of residency as a psychiatrist in 2007. The novel explores Physical and Mental Wandering; Race, Ethnicity, and Difference; and New York City as a Palimpsest.

This guide uses the 2012 Random House Trade Paperback Edition.

Content Warning: The source material contains discussions of sexual assault, suicide, and hate crimes against a variety of marginalized groups, as well as tension between members of different marginalized groups, including antisemitic ideas. There is also mention of a vehicular death of a child.

Plot Summary

Julius, the first-person narrator and protagonist of Open City, is a 34-year-old psychiatry resident in New York City. In literary terms, Julius is first and foremost a flaneur—a term popularized by the 19th-century French novelist Charles Baudelaire to mean one who spends his time walking the city streets, observing the life of the city as it unfolds around him. At the novel’s outset, Julius finds his walk interrupted by the New York Marathon, and the detour he takes to avoid it leads him to the door of an aging former professor, Saito. He finds the professor extremely sick with cancer, and departs, saddened, to observe the marathon. Julius buys groceries and visits several other stores. Back at his apartment, Julius thinks about his girlfriend, Nadège, calling to break up with him.

The next night’s wanderings take Julius through the New York subway system, which he compares to the realm of a Yoruba god. On his way to a movie theater, he stops at a bookstore and purchases a book written by one of his psychiatric patients. The film he finally watches, Last King of Scotland, disturbs him with its interpretation of history, and he returns home. His next foray into the world sees him walking in the rain in Central Park, thinking about his split Nigerian and German heritage. He visits a museum to escape the rain, then catches a cab home. He has a tense exchange with the driver, who is also a Black man from Africa.

Julius spends the next day watching a poetry reading and visiting New York locations, such as Trinity Church, Wall Street, the Statue of Liberty, and Ground Zero, the former site of the World Trade Center. These sites make him think about history, as do his encounters with a detained immigrant, Saidu, in Queens and a shoe shiner in Penn Station. His historical ruminations become more dramatic as he experiences waking dreams of the past, including draft riots and a lynching.

After ruminating on his education and how he arrived in New York City, Julius decides to vacation in Brussels over his winter break, hoping to reconnect with his Belgian grandmother. The trip is uneventful. He fails to contact his grandmother, but he meets several intellectuals whose views challenge his own, including Dr. Maillotte, a retired doctor who lived through World War II, and Farouq, a politically-active employee of an internet cafe whose thesis was rejected as a result of Islamophobia after 9/11.

Upon his return to New York, Julius dreads the prospect of working after his extended vacation. While he was in Brussels, one of Julius’s psychiatric patients died. He visits a museum of photography, but something about the museum makes him feel like an intruder, and he is unable to enjoy the experience. The feeling of being an unwelcome intruder in spaces he ought to be able to enter freely is becoming more and more a part of his life. At the same time, he is developing memory problems. Unable to remember his pin number, he remembers instead the title of a movie with four digits. When he happens upon a woman he once knew in Nigeria, whose name is Moji, he fails to remember her.

Julius continues visiting the ailing Saito, who complains of bedbugs. Saito dies a few weeks after Julius’s last visit, and Julius is not invited to the private memorial. Julius’s wandering continues during this time, with visits to Chinatown and Battery Park.

Julius is confronted with more specters of racism, as his department head is removed for racism against Asian patients. At the same time, as a result of his aimless wandering, Julius is mugged, getting injured in the process. While his injuries heal, he talks with his friends, including Moji, about structural racism, and how problems with the world can be misdiagnosed as mental illnesses.

Moji invites Julius to a party at her boyfriend’s apartment, where she reveals that Julius sexually assaulted her. Julius has no memory of this, but his memory has been notably unreliable throughout the novel, and it is understood that his failure to remember the incident does not mean it didn’t happen.

Julius finishes his residency at the hospital and goes into private practice as a psychiatrist. He attends a symphony and notes that he is the only Black man there. As the orchestra begins to play, he remembers hearing the same music playing in a store several months prior. The novel closes with Julius wandering the city once again. A tour boat invites him to come aboard for free, and while viewing the city from the harbor, he reflects the cost of human infrastructure to the local wildlife and the changes wrought on the city by the attacks of September 11.