The paragraphs I’ve discussed in this series for far tend to be the ones that lead in surprising directions. These paragraphs exploit our expectation that paragraphs will be coherent, creating surprise and, often, humour when we realize, by the end, that we’ve drifted into something new. This drift, retrospectively, can be indicative of a certain state or tendency in the narrator: evasiveness, repression, distraction, whatever.

The paragraph I’m quoting this time, from Teju Cole’s Open City (2011), is similar, though its shift is the opposite of gradual. For context, the paragraph begins when the narrator, Julius, arrives at a tax office to meet with an accountant called Parrish, who’s asked Julius to pay by cheque. Julius has forgotten the cheque and, when he tried to take cash out of an ATM, realizes he can’t remember his PIN. Now here’s the paragraph:

When I finally sat down with Parrish, I told him that I had neglected to bring my checkbook. I said nothing about the cash machines. He was solemn, and as he adjusted his cuff links, I had the feeling of having disturbed a carefully calibrated universe. I apologized, and assured him I would put the check in the mail right away. He shrugged, and I signed the tax paperwork he had prepared for me. I was awed by this unsuspected area of fragility in myself. It was an insignificant portent of age, the kind I tended to smile at in others, the kind I took as a mark of vanity. I thought of the few white curls that had sprung up and were now nestled in the black mass of my hair. I used to joke about them, but I knew also that the entire head of hair would someday change color, that the white strands would multiply, and would win eventually, that if I lived to old age, like Mama, there would be hardly any of the black ones left.

Teju Cole. Open City. New York: Random House, 2011, p. 162.

When I first read this paragraph, I initially believed I’d missed something. On second read, I realized that, no, I had not missed an important connection between the somewhat uncomfortable encounter with Parrish and the reflections on white hair. It’s just that the paragraph simply shifts topics halfway through, without any obvious motivation or signal. In fact, Cole is extra tricky in making this happen: he delays telling us what “this unsuspected area of fragility” is, and even defers telling us that this fragility is “in myself,” so it’s easy to enter the white-hair half of the paragraph still believing that we’re talking about Parrish. My first reading, I thought Julius was commenting on Parrish’s fragility (to, say, a situation that didn’t go as expected, no matter how mundane), but then I read “in myself.” It took me a while to realize that what was happening was an interesting conflict between what I expect in a paragraph (a single focus or topic) and what Cole was giving me. The use of the word “this” in “this unsuspected area of fragility” is particularly tricky: it could be “this” as in “previously mentioned/hinted at,” suggesting that Julius is still talking about the same thing as before (this is how I first read it) but it really is “this” as in “a particular,” like in the impression “I met this guy who…”

Overall, the impression is one of Julius suddenly becoming abstracted or detached from the social situation he’s in with Parrish and reflecting (probably not for the first time) on a private worry about signs of aging. Cole performs a bit of a risk, then: he constructs a paragraph that is, by most definitions, not a good paragraph, in order to reveal something quite subtly but effectively about what’s happening in the narrator’s mind during the encounter he is reporting.