It's here.

Teju Cole's novel, Open City, published by Random House, launches today in bookstores and through online vendors, to numerous rave and perceptive reviews.

That will be no surprise to readers of my blog, The Cassandra Pages, who've been privileged from time to time to read Teju's essays here, illustrated with his photographs. I am absolutely thrilled about the publication of this debut novel (those of us who read Every Day is For the Thief know that he previously wrote a novella.) But regardless of marketing talk, and even regardless of my close friendship with the author, I feel confident in saying that Open City is a hugely accomplished novel that, I predict and hope, will mark the formal debut of a formidable literary career.

I was fortunate to be able to read early chapters in draft form, and then the entire book in manuscript. Open City is not a plot-driven novel, though there is a dark story that gradually emerges. Julius, the protagonist, is an emotionally-distant psychiatry resident in a New York hospital, and also an immigrant: the son of a German mother and African father. In order to shake off the work of his days, he takes to wandering the streets of the city at night. In luminous prose we follow his mind as he seeks to make connections between himself and the places he visits, as well as observing his strange disconnection to emotions and people: his former girlfriend, his neighbors, people he encounters. Only in his relationship to an aged Japanese professor do we find glimmers of a different possibility: a warmth and mutual interest that almost approach tenderness.

Parts of the book also take place in Brussels and in Lagos; and in all these descriptions of urban places and human encounters, both brief and extended, we are drawn into Julius' brilliant obsession with facts and history that has already reminded many reviewers of W.G. Sebald, at the same time as we ponder what appears more and more to be a self-imposed, even protective, psychological distance: why? What is he escaping or blotting out, and what does this say about the state of all immigrants, particularly in today's America?

As alien as Julius' character is to my own, I found him completely believable. The book's dialogue is vibrantly written, and the descriptive passages beautiful and full of telling detail, all of which advance the story even though its movement is not always apparent: a subtlety that is actually more true to life than the exaggeration of plot and character of most novels and films we've come to take for granted.

For me, the greatest accomplishment of this book is there, in the writing itself: the use of language, and most particularly, the control of narrative tone. Not only does Teju arrive on the New York literary scene with a first novel of great maturity, but he's doing so with a narrative voice that is quiet, meditative, and open. By open I mean that rather than filling his sentences and our minds with cleverness or dazzle, with fast-paced plot and action, with the breathlessness that mirrors our frantic, modern, western lives, he has left space -- much like the rests in music -- that allow the words to breathe and the reader to think. Frankly, this is not the fashion, in any of the arts today. But Teju has stepped back from the front of the stage, and written in his own way. I admire that, and know that it is neither the easy nor certain path. This type of prose can only emerge from deep sensitivity, silence, thought, and great attention to the craft of writing.

Teju, we all wish you the very best today: for Open City, and for wherever your wanderings, pen in hand, take you in the future. Thank you for the gift of your words.