Open City

i tried to read this but just couldn't do it. Cole is talented, and his writing has a poetic touch and an elegant style. The problem is that it is asking altogether too much to expect the reader to follow the often mundane and meandering thoughts of the protagonist with no real narrative arc to help propel the story.

No thank you. 
I was barely tolerating a less than stimulating, somewhat standoffish protagonist who had a tendency to go off on historical tangents for the sake of Cole's ability to turn a phrase, but then he decided to throw in a despicable act near the end, perhaps recognizing that his work was lacking a little spice, and then left it unacknowledged for the remainder of the text. I'm sure there's some literary scholar or critic who's tying themselves in knots over this ‘stylistic choice' but I just found it underhanded and distasteful. 
Before that particular passage, here's what I was thinking: 
Somewhat of a natural transition to go from Cole's collection of essays (Known and Strange Things) to this work of fiction, as the narrative feels like a series of interlinked vignettes, not quite a short story collection. 
The main character tells snippets of his own life but also conveniently meets a number of people in his walks and other travels that seem to feel compelled to tell him their life stories in the span of a few pages, often in retrospect, not quite mournful, but war/conflict/violence/loss seems to be in the background of many stories.
Insights into personal histories, and how world history has shaped people.
Thought after the essay collection, that given his penchant for slipping into the poetic in the middle of non-fiction, any fiction novel would benefit from Cole's writing style, but it mirrors the essay collection in being heavy on the descriptive and ready at any moment to take on society's ills. These are not necessarily bad qualities, but they fail to gel into a compelling narrative. 
If you're looking for a slow quiet collection of moments of people discussing art, literature and social issues...[I might have suggested it before having gotten to the unnecessarily ugly twist]. 
Cole introduces a side character called Farouq, and given the man's ideas and plans expressed (the frustration with Othering, and the need to see the different appreciated rather than assimilated, his translation studies and his work in the phone/internet boutique -seen as a microcosm of different kinds of people, from different places, religions, languages, all existing in harmony-  a pacifist with sharp, even contentious, religious and political views), I would dearly love to have a novel from Farouq's perspective... [if I still believed I could trust this author not to pull dirty tricks out of nowhere]. 
Narrator seems a teensy but elitist in his tastes and judgement of other's scholarship [but wait, he gets worse!]
Might have loved this more if it was framed up as  journal entries in walks taken [turns out not enough of the story is framed that way to make it worthwhile]. 
The disconnect the protagonist seems to feel towards strangers reaching out, contrasted occasionally with his interest in communicating with other strangers when they have a story he wants to hear, and his coolness in the early days and subsequent and retroactive woundedness about a recent ex moving on make a bit more sense if you take the view that the long game for this author was to make the main character unlikeable, but I've learned that the only thing I like less than a book focusing on an unlikeable character filled with attempted suspense and thrills, is a book that can't make up its mind on the likeableness of a character, and is more likely to deliver New York history trivia than any kind of revelations. Do NOT recommend. 

⚠️SA, ableism, ableist and homophobic slurs, racism/xenophobia, recounting of hate crimes, discussion of planned end of life, discussion of bedbugs 😖