Teju Cole and the wilfull rejection of the devices of fiction

Can there be any doubt regarding the influence of W.G. Sebald, particularly "Austerlitz," on Teju Cole's debut novel, "Open City"? Aside from the very similar, striking, and beautiful tone and sensibility, uncovering lawyers of the past through wanderings, study of arcana, and encounters with (voluble) strangers, now at the half-way point in Open City the narrator, Julius, flies to Belgium (Brussels) in part to try to find and reconnect with his estranged German grandmother - and readers or Austerlitz or of this blog may remember that A began (and ended) in Belgium and the central episode was A's journey to eastern Europe to try to learn about the disappearance of the mother he'd been separated from in early childhood. I don't say this to criticize Cole - he has chosen an excellent model to emulate. I am enjoying Open City passage by passage, page by page, but I any reader has to recognize that this the antithesis of a page-turner. The plot such as it is never develops and I continue to be frustrated at how little the narrator reveals about himself, He's not an opaque narrator in that he does tell us some of the essential facts of his life and alludes to various family and romantic dramas, but Cole intentionally leaves these matters rather skeletal - his interests as a writer lie elsewhere. I see enormous promise in Cole's work, but I hope that as he matures - and maybe even as this novel matures - he will pay some homage to the more conventional devices of (even literary) fiction. As someone (C.Calbert) wisely said in a writing group I was a member of: Readers like plot. Yes. I can live without plot at times, and to a degree, but the willful rejection of plot pushes readers away from a work that many might otherwise discover and love.