Yikes, pretty harsh takedown by an Amazon reviewer
Worst Novel of 2011, June 22, 2011 By
Someone Like You (New York City) -
See all my reviews
This review is from: Open City: A Novel (Hardcover)
This is easily the worst novel I have read all year. How James Wood, in the New Yorker, failed to rip it to shreds I don't know. Here are the rather obvious main problems:
1. It's poorly written.
2. It's got factual errors.
3. It's ungodly boring.
4. The narrator (a shrink who goes to poetry readings) is not believable.
5. It's pedantic.
Point 1. There are sentences in this book that are so bad it will make your head spin. One quick example (there are hundreds, if not more) from page 42: "In a cove formed by two large rocks, I went and sat, as though led by an invisible hand, on a pile of gravel." Teju Cole uses commas the way Tiger Woods used strippers: frequently. Cole also has a tin ear for how people talk. Imagine a surgeon, describing where she lives, saying this: "You must call me if you ever come to Philadelphia. We have a house near the woods, in the suburbs, which is wonderful in the summer, and even better in the fall." Oh, THE WOODS! Oh, you live NEAR THE WOODS! How wonderful! On page 145 he describes a busload of people thusly: "It was warm and damp inside, and everyone found it hard to breathe." Really? How does he know this?
Point 2. It's like the author visited Manhattan on Google Maps instead of actually walking the streets. His description of the Deutsche Bank building on Wall Street (the atrium) is incorrect. It doesn't look that way at all. On page 149 he says, "It was to be a year without a real winter. The blizzards for which I braced never came. There were a few days of cold rain, and one or two cold snaps, but heavy snow stayed away. We had a series of sunny days in December..." That's all well and good, but the first day of winter isn't until December 21st! The 'heavy snow' comes in January and February, a fact the narrator should be aware of considering he has lived in NYC for several years.
Point 3. This book moves about as quickly as a prolonged water-boarding session. There is no suspense or drive to the narrative whatsoever, and the narrator wasn't funny/interesting/smart/insane enough to keep my attention for more than five or ten pages at a stretch. I've read plenty of heavy fiction--DFW, Dostoevski, Gaddis--and rarely has it been such a struggle to move from page to page.
Point 4. The narrator is a shrink doing his residency. He also goes to poetry readings. He also takes month-long vacations by himself, like the one to Brussels featured in the book. He calls in prescriptions while in Brussels. Really? There's some mention of a patient, but it's tangential and never deeply explored. Every shrink I know is neurotic and bizarre--it's like a requirement of the profession. Yet this guy is uber-dull, uber-normal. He has no hang-ups. In fact, there's nothing interesting about him at all except his 'foreign-ness' and the fact he grew up in Nigeria. So what? That experience, while it informs his character to an extent, does not seem to imbue him with any special powers of perception. He observes a lot, but he doesn't really SEE differently than a tourist from Iowa or anyone else for that matter. Take, for instance, his observation that "By fifty...a woman's appearance often requires effort." (p.109). Really? I think most women start to put 'effort' into it a little earlier...say, like, 13. Ah, also...the narrator has an accountant...who works on Wall Street! What accountant works on Wall Street? Obviously there are some, but it's as though Cole, stupidly, conflated personal finance with corporate finance.
Point 5. The book is basically one long, dull lecture with small breaks in between. The author means, of course, to dazzle us with his erudition but he might as well be reading the Encyclopedia to us...there's no value-add from him. It's just words. So, we get lectured on the following:
The paintings of John Brewster
Dutch settler Anthony de Hooges
Sperm whales
(Sperm whales bring to mind another absurdity of the narrator and his narration. While he's supposed to be a shrink, trained in medicine, he apparently has a photographic memory for dates related to all manner of ancient facts. He rattles off specifics as though they were at the very front of his mind, but, clearly, could not possibly be so. Of sperm whales he says, on page 51, "In 1598, the fifty-four-foot sperm whale that beached itself in the sandy shallows of Berckhey, near The Hague, had taken four days to die and, in that time and in the weeks afterward, had intered into the legend of a nation at the very beginning of its modern history." How does he know this? Did he google it? Is it really in his brain? If so, why is it in his brain? And, most importantly, why does he think the reader cares about this?)
Vlaams Belang (a political party)
Robert DeNiro
The photojournalism of Munkacsi
Bedbugs
Killer bees
The practice of pschiatry (this passage, beginning on page 204, is incomprensibly bad. There isn't a shrink in the world who would write this about his own profession.)
The slave trade
ETC
ETC
ETC
There is so much more that's awful...I could simply reprint the whole book with margin notes. He's got a hedge fund titan living up near the Cloisters. Are you kidding me? No hedge fund titan worth his salt lives north of 86th Street. And on and on. The narrator remembers minutia from his childhood, colors, dates, words, it's all just ridiculous.
Burn your money before you buy this book.
