Teju Cole's "anti-novel," Open City

In part 2 (second half) of Teju Cole's "Open City," his narrator, Julius, returns to New York after a month in Brussels spent doing - basically, nothing. I don't mean this as a put-down in that there are many things I love about this book, but it's really what you might call an "anti-novel": it wears the accoutrements of a novel, beautiful writing, trenchant observations, a wide range of literary and cultural references, beautifully rendered scenes and places and climates and seasons, occasional profound psychological insights, and the slight strangeness, the minor displacements of sensibility, that make a work literary and unique. But, as I've noted in previous posts, it has no real characters, other than the narrator, no plot to speak of, and no back story - so what have we? Julius, the narrator, is intriguing and potentially a good or even great character, but even approaching the end of the novel I'm not sure how to judge him: we know quite a few biographical facts about him, but these facts do not really cohere into a character because there is no story line to him, no arc of narrative that embraces his life. To the extent that he is a character, he is, as earlier noted, as alienated as a Camus hero: he feels nothing, has no relationships (toward the end he grows tender toward his old professor, now dying), estranged from family - I don't honestly know if Cole thinks of him as alienated and wants to portray him as such, or if he, as a writer, doesn't know how to or doesn't care to build the web of connections that usually hold a novel together. I am constantly amused by Cole/Julius's arcane references: Julius will be in a church and hear some music and it will remind him of some 20th-century piece or opera that, believe me, you've never heard of - maybe some of these references are made up, but some of the literary ones do check out. Julius spends an evening reading Piers Plowman, which makes him (or Cole?) without a doubt the only person in the world outside of a English grad student medievalist to read this book in 20 years.