In one way, it hardly matters -- editors at The New York Times already dubbed "Open City" one of the 10 best books of any kind published last year. Cultural arbiter James Wood announced in The New Yorker that Cole's work was "beautiful, subtle" and "original."
But these sources pronounce from Manhattan, coincidentally the setting for the bulk of Cole's story. My reservations grew a touch crankier at the opening sentence: "And so when I began to go on evening walks last fall, I found Morningside Heights an easy place from which to set out into the city."
Oh, that city -- the one so thoroughly neglected in literature. But one reason to read is to surmount prejudice, and I am flat-out glad to have succumbed to the calm, considerable spell that Cole casts.
"Open City" unfurls in the voice of Julius, a resident in psychiatry at a Columbia University-affiliated hospital. He, like Cole, grew up in Lagos, Nigeria, and came to the United States at 17. Julius is of mixed race, a superb listener, but disengaged. Lightly, he mentions that he lies, that he forgets people who remember him. Yet his perception is lapidarian.
Walking Manhattan, he asks, "Where in this riverine city could one fully sense a riverbank? Everything was built up, in concrete and stone . . . The water was a kind of embarrassing secret, the unloved daughter, neglected, while the parks were doted on, fussed over, overused."
The observational intelligence that suffuses "Open City" is the type that inspires a reader to look sharp. The book begins slowly, its voice unforced and associative, but its power gathers.
In a park south of Wall Street, Julius describes "an avenue bordered by sturdy, heavy-headed elms." Eight Chinese women of various age danced in formation. At the other end of the park, musicians played ancient instruments called erhus and a woman "sang softly, matching the bowed strings note for note . . . I thought of Li Po and Wang Wei, of Harry Partch's pitch-bending songs, and of Judith Weir's opera The Consolations of Scholarship, which were the things I could best connect to this Chinese music. The song, the clear day, and the elms: it could have been any day from the last fifteen hundred years."
Thirty pages later in Chinatown, Julius is alone except for the proprietress in a dusty, obscure gift shop, and another scene opens into a stunning porousness in time. Cole's approach is frequently compared to W.G. Sebald's, but the fluidity and contingency put me in mind of Virginia Woolf's.
Last month, Cole told the Hindu magazine that he tucked into his novel a "very close, formal analogue" to a story in James Joyce's "Dubliners."
This fullness is a fullness of the interior life. Plenty of readers looking for plot might complain that nothing happens. They would be wrong -- both technically, and metaphysically. A mentor dies, a lover moves away, a dear friend isn't named -- Julius' aloneness is reinforced everywhere. He can infuriate and confuse, but he is exceptionally hard to put away.
On Wednesday, the night before the vote, Cole and the other NBCC finalists each will give a short public reading in New York. For the audience, these evenings are a chance to speed date some of the best minds on the planet. I plan to sit down front.