Very promising start to Teju Cole's Open City

Last night began Teju Cole's very promising debut novel, "Open City": From the first paragraph yu know you are definitely in the hands of a writer who cares about language and about style, a writer with copious intelligence and a broad and interesting band of knowledge, a writer well versed in the tradition of literary fiction. A great opening paragraph about wanderings on the streets of New York and some fine wrriting throughout the first chapter as the narrator, whom we eventually learn is named Julius?, wanders downtown during a NYC marathon, walks a few blocks with one of the runners post-race, stop sin to see his very aged mentor professor, talks briefly about jazz with one of his (few?) friends, and remembers learning that the woman in the apartment next door died months back and he'd never noticed or realized. Cole as noted is a very talented writer, and his style (and subject) will inevitably remind many readers of Joseph O'Neil's Netherland: the polymath narrator with a range of quirky instincts, the deliberate accumulation of observed detail and reflection, the attachment to the streets of New York, though I would say in Cole's case the polymath comes off at times as show-off or even parody (I'm not sure, for example, if the French philosophers or some of the books on his reading list are so hip and cutting edge that I don't even know them or if they're made up, as are some of the academic names). Bigger concern, and I'll see how this develops, is tendency to eschew traditional plot and even character development: he is in no rush to put the bone in the throat, so to speak; we have no idea, after first chapter, what this novel is about (O'Neil was very direct in building the element of suspense). Even the character - we learn a lot about what interests this narrator and how his mind works, but so far virtually nothing about who is he, where he's from, what brought him to this point in his life. Cole also reminds me in some ways of Sebald - the wanderings, the befriending of strangers, the odd observations about the passing and the ruins of time. We'll see how it develops from this very promising start.