Editorial

First Love’s Sequel

Originally printed in Compass, Oct 30, 2019.

The second creative act of André Aciman is a bit of magic, but so is the novel that has inspired it. A month after the 2017 theatrical release of the Academy-Award winning adaptation of Aciman’s slim literary paperback that had been passed around, quietly but affectionately, by word of mouth, “Call Me By Your Name” debuted on the New York Times Best Seller list for the first time — 10 years after its publication. 

Now placed in the culture as a modern romantic classic, it makes sense that Aciman would return to the novel, and engage with his newly clamorous audience that has discovered his nimble ways of navigating the concealed uncertainties of love’s first yearnings. His sequel, perhaps titled with some pluck, is called, “Find Me.”

What will readers find? For viewers of the film, which ended with 17-year-old Elio parting with Oliver, the graduate student with whom he shared a rare connection, the answer is likely dismay. Joined together for one summer in the 1980s, when Oliver is a guest in the Italian home of Elio’s family, “Call Me By Your Name,” explores the tentative anxieties of their youthful courtship. Unlike the film, the novel continues long past the initial heartbreak, to a tense meeting 15 years later, and finally to an uncertain reunion in the same Italian home, 20 years since the two first met, the time lost irreversible.

The mistaken hope is that Aciman would betray his initial artistic decision and pen the source material for a new film for young actors Armie Hammer and Timothée Chalamet, tying their story in a blissful bow of swoony gratification. It was never going to be so.

The new novel is divided into separate sections for Elio, Oliver, and most of all Elio’s father, Samuel — three sensitive, erudite Jewish men in different countries, at different stages of their lives, ruminating on the loneliness of the time stretched out in front of them and on the faint possibility of second acts. Echoes of regret linger for each, but have the spiritual aches of aging ever been cured with such smutty gusto? With the fervency of a naughty puppy humping at your leg? Despite the first novel’s nuanced dissections of the delicacy of intimacy, “Call Me By Your Name” remains famous for its narrator’s kinky experiments in his sexual awakening. “Find Me” is less creative, yet more thematically kinky as a salute to the eroticism of being a father. Call me daddy.

On a train to Rome to see his son, now a classical pianist, Samuel meets Miranda, a fellow American half his age (this is not a judgment, but a recurring statement). He’s a divorced scholar of the Byzantine Empire, she’s an effervescent maybe-30 model-type who hangs on his every word, intuits his every veiled meaning, and is off to visit her dying father, an academic himself for whom she carries a complicated love. By the evening’s end, Samuel and Miranda, in the throes of copulation — which includes some unashamedly paternal dirty talk pulled from Ovid’s “Metamorphosis” — have pledged to have a child. 

Elio, meanwhile, now 30ish in Paris, acts out a similar “Death of the Father” affair with Michel, a 60-something silver-haired lawyer he meets during the intermission of a Hadyn concert. “You remind me of my son,” Michel says on a date, and it’s seemingly taken as both confession and wistful flirtation. This time however, it is the elder paramour’s father who must be exorcised — an emotionally-withholding pianist who also once had an affair with a man twice his age. So ‘round the wheel of phantom selves, transference and catharsis seems to spin. Oliver, now a father to two boys off at prep school, is left on the Upper West Side in an emotional limbo. 

“Find Me” is set across years but always in the dying months of fall, the same fading season of “Persuasion,” Jane Austen’s cyclical novel of lonely aging that reminds us, “a chance at love can come again.”  Yet here, where Aciman’s characters haunt their own pasts with ritualized visits to the places of their younger days, there is a tinge of cruelty to the novel’s dedication to moving on. It offers multiple bursts of heady lust, but sacrifices the single, soulful bond that lingers now on the outskirts of the novel. As a separate work, “Find Me,” in both sensitively rendered details (some of Elio’s section) and gloppy passages of ribald bravado (much of Samuel’s), has something to say about the magnetism that can develop between seasoned men and their younger, intellectually engaged counterparts. As sequel to his best work however, it is weighed by its own demand for existence: some magic only works once.