Open City

Julius was a student in Professor Saito’s English Literature class at Maxwell College, and the two men remained friends after he graduated and went on to medical school. Julius says he “learned the art of listening” (9) from Saito. Saito is mainly characterized by his love of books. He memorized “Shakespeare’s sonnets, and large tracts of Yeats” (14) and had “overstuffed bookshelves” (170). Literature helped Saito cope during his time in a World War II prison camp. He does not talk to Julius about his romantic life, but Julius learns from the alumni magazine that Saito had a male partner who passed away. Saito himself dies from cancer late in the novel. Julius visited Saito for many years before his death but, in the few weeks prior to Saito’s passing, Julius admits that “avoiding the drama of death, its unpleasantness, had been my inadvertent idea in not going there” (183). Julius is not present for Saito’s death, which can be compared to how Julius is in Brussels when his patient V. takes her own life.

A different kind of loss in Julius’s life is that of his girlfriend Nadège before the beginning of the novel. Julius wonders whether he values his relationships with both Saito and Nadège more than the other person does. After Saito’s death, Julius “had a moment of peculiar doubt just then: perhaps I had overvalued the relationship, and the importance of it had been mine alone” (184). Similarly, after Nadège has moved to San Francisco and the two have split, Julius is not able “to admit to myself that I had made too much of our brief relationship” (155). He remembers seemingly insignificant details about her, for instance, that she walked with a slight limp and that she used to become irritated with him when he used his expired student ID to get discounted museum tickets. When Nadège sends Julius a Christmas card, it causes him to hope they might reconnect, but she is engaged and busy with preparations for her wedding.

Moji does not appear until Part 2 of the novel. She is from Nigeria and knew Julius when he was a teenager there. When they run into each other in a grocery store in New York City, he notes that she is like an “apparition” (156) that haunts him. This hints at the plot twist that happens in Chapter 20—she says that he has haunted her since he raped her back in Nigeria. Before this confession, Julius notes that Moji “was not beautiful in the way I expected dark women to be” (198) and he is “having such a difficult time reading her” (204). This is because he does not remember her, arguably because he repressed the memory of their sexual encounter.

Moji is an investment banker and dates a man named John Musson. After a party at John’s house, during which Julius is “flirting with Moji, not with any expectation, but for the pleasure of it” (240), Moji talks to Julius about his sexual assault. She says, the “luxury of denial had not been possible for her” (244). This can be contrasted with how Julius forgets much of his past in Nigeria. Moji “had tried to forgive, she said, and to forget, but neither had worked” (245). This can be seen in how, at the beginning of Part 2, she is friendly with Julius, but this friendliness evaporates after the party where he flirts with her in front of her boyfriend.

Julius repeatedly thinks about and interacts with a friend who is never named, but simply referred to as “my friend” (23). His friend is an Earth Sciences professor, father, Black man, and jazz lover. Over the course of the novel, the unnamed friend begins dating a woman named Lise-Anne. There is a “balance in his seriousness and her natural lightness” (197), Julius thinks. During a picnic in Central Park, the unnamed friend confesses that several of his family members were involved with drugs or suffered from mental illness.

Later in the novel, the unnamed friend’s apartment becomes infested with bedbugs, just as Saito’s apartment did before he died. On top of that, his tenure application is rejected by Columbia. As a result, he and Lise-Anne move out of New York, and he takes “a teaching position at the University of Chicago” (242). After his friend relocates, Julius becomes more isolated in New York City. The unnamed friend is a foil to Julius. Julius, unlike his friend, is unwilling to leave New York City and turns down a psychiatry position in New Jersey.