Author: Jacob Watson

By Jacob Watson

Five years does seem like a long time to take to get around to reading the highly anticipated follow up to Call Me By Your Name, one of the most iconic books/films of recent times. But then again I’m just your average common reader so I can’t be hated for taking this long. And the book was published twelve years after Call Me By Your Name anyway. So Find Me basically had to wait twelve years to get published, and then another five years to finally get picked up and read by yours truly. 

Still, that pales in comparison to the twenty years the characters – Elio and Oliver! – had to wait to finally reconnect. And the reader of Find Me might feel themself to be sharing in their waiting: as has been decried by almost every reader of this book, you have to push through over two hundred pages of seemingly unrelated material before the terrible twosome themselves finally get together properly in the last fifteen or so pages of the book. 

Waiting – being made to wait, making things wait – is clearly a big thing in the book. And it reminds me of the opening of Call Me By Your Name in fact: Elio’s recollection of Oliver’s constant and apparently meaningless use of the word “later”. One difference, though, may be that in the earlier book, we are made to wait and watch the romance develop, and the plot quicken and get weightier, and that’s really part of its appeal. Whereas with Find Me, your average reader is just waiting for the book to give what it needs to give, in order to justify its existence. 

And that’s the issue, isn’t it: this was always a book cursed to inherit all sorts of waiting, from the characters, the readers, the writer himself, and around the narrative skeleton of characters less pretentious and robotic as these ones, it may be the stuff great novels are made of. But Aciman seems to have misjudged the capacity of his characters to satisfyingly dramatise this waiting. So, apparently in order to add substance to his novel, he makes the cardinal sin of producing a novel that relies on the author’s (characters’s) intelligence and cultural knowledge to work. 

Thus in this instance, what you end up with, annoyingly, is a highly stylised and conceptually intriguing novel whose characters come across as utterly transparent, lazily drawn puppets, the sole purpose of whom is to voice (sometimes implicitly but gratingly often explicitly) all the theory and cultural reference and intellect with which Aciman feels compelled to salt his text. They certainly don’t think, talk or act the way people do, but they think, talk and act the way Aciman needs them to in order to fill the black hole in his text left by all the implicit waiting. And it doesn’t even pay off: when the characters finally stop their wholly unconvincing, preposterously robotic and referential and incessant dialogue, it’s seemingly only ever to pose little rhetorical questions inquiring into the nature of their own minds. Obviously, not all character-narrators owe the reader complete narrational and mental transparency, and a bit of unreliability and unclarity is nice. But one can only really groan when it becomes clear that the questions, for instance, are only there to hint at and suggest an awareness of the psychological depths and recesses that Aciman apparently can’t be bothered to plumb. Consider these random quotes where Sami Perlman is talking about getting to know the woman from the train: “Had I once again spoken out of turn and crossed a line?”; “When was the last time I’d spoken to someone like this?”; “Had I yet again snubbed her without meaning to?”; “Was she teasing me?” Girl, I don’t know! And it doesn’t look as though André Aciman does, either. For this whole first episode of the novel, nothing seems real, and not in the good way. Knowing each other for one day, Sami Perlman and Miranda, the woman from the train, decide that theirs is the greatest love story ever told, discuss having a baby and consider getting matching tattoos. I literally was not convinced for a single moment. Questions like these worm their way into Elio’s part of the novel as well. And again it just seems like lazy writing. 

There’s actually another little stylish trait that grated on me while I was reading Find Me. All four sections of the novel are strewn with these unbelievably cringe-inducing and irritating italicised phrases. I think this is a longstanding trait of Aciman’s actually – it was in Call Me By Your Name, too. But here, it’s just unfathomable. Or, at least, at first it was. Though there wasn’t ever much evidence throughout the novel as far as genuine narration is concerned, I was able to gradually come into an awareness of the nature of these italicised phrases, and I think it has something to do with tense. Though the whole novel is told through the minds of the narrators in the past tense, the italicised bits of narrative appear to be thoughts directly lifted from the characters’s actual minds at the time they are describing. Have some examples: “Why am I not even hesitating?”; “This is what I’ve always wanted. This and you.”; “I shook my head. Like you needed to ask.”; or even the woefully mechanical: “Just kiss me, will you, if only to help me get over being so visibly flustered.”

Now then. This struck me as extremely unnecessary. Doesn’t all past-tense narrative, its goal being to recollect and present the sensation of events as they had happened, work through burning the fossil fuel of present-tense sensations that have buried themselves in the brain? That is, given that all past-tense narrative operates via the previousness of a present-tense sensation pressing itself through time zones into a new present, and that that is the implied machinery of all past-tense narrative, especially one invested anyway in time, why should the writer even bother to distinguish between the two? Again, it seems to me to be a sort of gimmick, insisted upon by the novelist in order to fraudulently suggest a crisp and clinical awareness on his part of the stream of perceptions, travelling and morphing across time zones in and through his characters’s minds. But for the reader who has unhappily admitted that the characters in the novel are literally insubstantial, you have to regretfully accept that the questions are just there to create the illusion of insight.

This leads me on to another of the novel’s problems. If these annoying little italicised bits only serve to arbitrarily and for no reason severe the time zones of the narrative on the level of form, it may only be because the novel brings with it so much sort of theoretical baggage that Aciman seems to insist on including in the novel, apparently just as a way of justifying or advocating for the underperformance of the narrative itself. Aciman, a Proust scholar, can be forgiven for trying to make his novel pretty Proustian. But only up to a certain point. The characters have annoying conversations about time, and fate, and strike me as how Proust may have written his novels if he had written them to a deadline and on the toilet. William Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky, Edith Wharton, Marcel Proust, Bach, all worm their way not only into the novel, but into completely unrelated conversations. And often when they do so they do so clumsily. Consider the unforgivably clunky Shakespeare reference, when Miranda’s father describes her as having “a tempest” inside her. If reading Dostoyevsky on a train is improbably enough, talking to the stranger on the train about why you’re reading Dostoyevsky is more improbable still.

If the explicit engagement with cultural reference and intellect is grating enough as it is, the implicit cultural and theoretical inheritance is no better. There are two cultural patrons of this novel: Proust and Freud. The Proust bits are either terrible or nice. When Aciman successfully brings Proust into the novel, it’s because he’s written a passage of thought so attractive in its grammar, in the placement of its different lexical weights and even punctuation, that one feels highly impressed. I’ll transcribe a nice bit, from Elio’s section, here: 

“What never ceased to amaze me and cast a halo around our evening was that ever since we’d met, we’d been thinking along the same lines, and when we feared we weren’t or felt we were wrong-footing each other, it was simply because we had learned not to trust that anyone could possibly think and behave the way we did, which was why I was so indifferent with him and mistrusted every impulse in myself and couldn’t have been happier when I saw how easily we’d shed some of our screens.” 

See? Nice! This works well largely because it’s a pleasant contrast to the novel’s utter lack of character insight; the passage offers a detailed and sharp unravelling of Elio’s motives and thoughts in a way that feels natural and self-fortifying. But parts like this are few and far between, and indeed I had to work quite hard to find my nice example.

There are also some plot points that are quite heavy-handedly Freudian, and these come across as sort of amateurish. I mean, the sexual psychology of Call Me By Your Name itself was liable to read in all sorts of Freudian ways, but in Find Me it gets a bit crazy: 

“I loved […] being coddled this way, loved when he started rubbing a lotion on me that felt wonderful each time he poured more of it on his palm and touched me everywhere. I felt like a toddler being washed and dried by his parent, which also took me back to my very earliest childhood when my father would shower with me in his arms.” 

I mean, come on. That sounds like if you pushed a microphone into a stranger’s face on the street and asked them to say something that sounds like something one of Freud’s patients would say. This man is a professor! Throwing Freudian-sounding little bits of lore is not enough to actually construct a narrator; but it appears to be all Aciman has at his disposal – alongside rhetorical questions and Shakespeare references, that is.

Aciman’s marginally more subtle involving of the Freudians, though still pretty obtrusive, may be in Find Me’s unusual fascination with dying, soon-to-be dead and dead fathers. Almost every character – I dare say every – has a father who is one of these three. It’s like a weird remix of kill your gays – kill off the fathers, and their sons will start being gay, acting gay, or come out as gay, or reconnect with the gay lover of that one Italian summer twenty years ago. I don’t know what the reader is meant to make of this. And I don’t know what Aciman was perhaps wanting to demonstrate: maybe he was just hoping to repeat an event throughout time frames and throughout his novel and hope that eventually it sediments into something bearing the semblance of relevance in the reader’s mind. 

But I think the worst crime this novel commits – and the one there is absolutely no excuse for – is the disgusting omnipresence of clichés so ridiculously overused that you can’t even yawn or roll your eyes at them because you’ve already yawned and rolled your eyes at those clichés throughout your life anyway. My hand almost cramped underlining them. Here are some:

I stared at him. “You know I’d like to.” And this wasn’t the single malt or the wine speaking.

My heart was racing, yet suddenly I felt awkward even if none of this was unfamiliar to me. 

[By] now his body knew mine better than it knew itself. 

I have nothing to add to this. It speaks for itself. 

You know, there’s a bit in this novel where Elio’s much older lover, Michel, describes their morning sex, having taken place after their night time sex, as their “hasty little […] sequel”, and if this weren’t such a lazily and amateurishly Freudian book I’d feel a morsel of guilt about reading those words as a bit of a Freudian slip on Aciman’s own part, too. But I don’t, since if any book opens itself up to criticisms of the nature of its actual writing, it’s this one. It’s a shame. A lot of the things everyone hated about this book I saw no reason to hate. For instance, I didn’t really care that there wasn’t much Elio-Oliver content, and would have been perfectly happy reading about the sexual adventures of Elio and his father (not together, I hope! But for a book this Freudian it’s not out of the question! (I joke.)); but this hasty little sequel to Call Me By Your Name is lazy in too many ways for me to like it any more that on a neutral level.

By Jacob Watson

Alan Hollinghurst’s third novel, The Spell, is unique in his bibliography, qualitatively and, if you like, quantitatively, in some compelling but confusing ways. His novels have tended to be huge six-hundred-or-so page tomes, large-scale state of the nation works which announce themselves formally and sometimes explicitly to be the inheritors of the Jane Austen and Henry James type of social novel. The Spell, on the other hand, barely makes it over the two-hundred page mark, and lacks the expansive social vision and criticism that his other novels are able to offer. 

The novel is described on the blurb as a “comedy of sexual manners”, and the placement of those terms is more revealing than it might seem. At points in the novel I wondered if it perhaps could do with being inverted: “a sexual comedy of manners”; I occasionally felt as though the novel represented something that maybe could have been a sexless comedy of manners, but which had had sex smothered onto it, resulting in a sort of neutral, traditional comedy of manners rendered sexual by Hollinghurst’s desire to just do so. But I think the description is in general more accurate, as the “sexual manners” the novel deals with are, themselves, indeed comedic, and a source of comedy. So, in a way it’s the inverse of my first thought: it’s not a comedic novel rendered sexual, but rather a sexual novel that can’t help coming across as comedic. 

The Spell is a more or less plotless affair, a pseudo-modernist carousel of narratives which focalise, revolvingly, on the perspectives of each of a set of four gay men, whose sex lives are intertwined beyond belief, twisted into a Gordian knot of desire that binds itself up even across implicit family lines. The sexual extremities on display here, and the neutrality with which they’re described, seem to amount to (to borrow the novel’s term slightly) a transvaluation of all sexual values, and in this regard the novel brings to mind the works of Jean Genet, in particular his Our Lady of the Flowers, to me at least. 

And it’s interesting that it does so, seeing as it resembles a piece of Genet-inclining modernist prose fiction. But it does so only in a limited way. I suppose the novel resembles Genet in a world where, instead of spending years in prison for homosexuality, Genet had gone to boarding school and then got two degrees from Oxford. This is a pretty colloquial phrasing of what I do in fact take to be the novel’s problem. In The Spell, Hollinghurst appears to have tried his hand at writing an airy, elusive, plotless circuit of intermingling sexual psychologies; but this kind of narrative can only succeed if the writer is genuinely willing to relinquish an insistence upon facts and details, actual and mental, to allow the novel, which he wants to be evocative, to actually evoke. Let me explain.

*

The kind of novel that Hollinghurst intended to write with The Spell only really works by being slightly elusive and unclear. But Hollinghurst can’t seem to shake off his formal affinity with the Victorian and Edwardian novelists: I mean, he did write his MA thesis on the novels of Forster, Firbank and Hartley. Perhaps this novel would have succeeded more if Hollinghurst were able to stop describing his characters’ every thought with a level of self-evaluation and insight that, if they actually had at the time of the events the novel describes, they may not have acted this way and produced the plot the descriptions are describing.

I mean, just look at the state of this sentence: “Alex felt the beautiful unwise emotions of something starting up, and grinned to himself between bites, as if his sandwich was unaccountably delicious; though what he was savouring was the longed-for surprise of being wanted.” This is the kind of sentence the modernists with whom The Spell is implying an affinity would never write; can you imagine Jean Genet, Woolf, Mansfield, writing something like that? Sentences like this, which are constant in the novel, imply a razor-sharp awareness and ability to monitor all the thoughts and feelings that stream through a character’s mind – an awareness that people just don’t have in real life, and which, looking at the actual plot of the novel, the characters certainly don’t have, either. Moreover, this kind of penetrative, retroactive psychological insight is not conducive to the success of the kind of novel that The Spell is striving to be. Those kinds of novels work by exploiting the evocative, richly sensual, the whiff of the unconscious occasionally finding its way to the surface, for instance. I guess what I mean is: a novel can’t be this plotless and unbelievable whilst also maintaining an Edwardian, Bennett-esque focus on the details, the events, of real life and the mind. 

Here’s a comparison by examples. Consider this extract from Our Lady of the Flowers:

“Now, as there was no bathtub in Darling’s home, he used to be dipped into a wash basin. Today, or some other day, though it seems to me today, while he was sleeping, he dreamed that he was entering a wash basin. He isn’t, of course, able to analyze himself, nor would he dream of trying to, but he is sensitive to the tricks of fate, and to the tricks of the theatre of fear. When Divine answers, “I’m doing the wash basin,” he thinks she is saying it to mean “I’m playing at being the wash basin,” as if she were “doing” a role. (She might have said: “I’m doing a locomotive.”) He suddenly gets an erection from the feeling that he has penetrated Divine in a dream. In his dream he penetrates the Divine of the dream of Divine, and he possesses her, as it were, in a spiritual debauch, And the following phrases come into his mind: “To the heart, to the hilt, right to the balls, right in the throat.””

This is one extract which actually bears some likeness, content-wise, with The Spell, but obviously is different in ways; ways that make it succeed. There is, I admit, a suggestion of genuine self-awareness (“he thinks she is saying it to mean […]”), but it of course ultimately falls, in favour of an obscuring, evocative stream of little psychic convulsions which imply rather than state the psycho-sexual state of affairs. Of course, to be fair, Our Lady of the Flowers is a first-person account, and the minds of the characters it describes obviously can’t reasonably be entirely traced by the limited narrational capacity of Jean; whereas the free-indirect-discourse of The Spell nominally allows for the narrator to know everything about its character’s motivations. But firstly, novels of this sort blur the lines between these distinct modes of narration anyway, and moreover, Hollinghurst actually remains probably just as present in the narration as Jean does in the Genet. And the very fact of that difference is part of The Spell’s unsuccessful attempts to adopt a precise formal mode – one that allows for the plotless narrative circle it wants to be. Here is Hollinghurst in The Spell describing a comparable psychological moment:

“One simple possibility for today was to give Terry a ring, but he [Justin] rejected it with a clear sense of tactics. He mustn’t give Robin any new occasion for his old grievances, and Terry’s discretion was still untested. He took a mug of tea through to the sitting-room and then remembered that there were some photographs of Danny in the little commode. He kept forgetting that he fancied him now as well.”

In both of these extracts, Genet and Hollinghurst are basically attempting to describe men absent-mindedly considering sex. But in the Genet, although the narration is of course much more imprecise, we nonetheless get a much more emphatic understanding of Darling’s character-essence. Whereas in the Hollinghurst, every single quivering of psychological motive is aired by the narrator. And let’s face it. There’s nothing more unsexy than having attention drawn to all your actual thoughts. Simply stated, everything may work in some novels, but not in a novel which strives to be airy and impressionistic, and especially not in one which allies itself with the queerly modernist aesthetic. Not to be basic, but I can’t help recalling these words from Woolf’s “Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown”:

“I let my Mrs. Brown slip through my fingers. I have told you nothing whatsoever about her. But that is partly the great Edwardians’ fault. I asked them—they are my elders and betters—How shall I begin to describe this woman’s character ? And they said, ” Begin by saying that her father kept a shop in Harrogate. Ascertain the rent. Ascertain the wages of shop assistants in the year 1878. Discover what her mother died of. Describe cancer. Describe calico. Describe -” But I cried, ” Stop ! Stop !” […]”

Woolf is, unsurprisingly, right; and Hollinghurst, striving to emulate the style of the queer modernists, ought to remember that there was a reason “modernism” felt a need to supplant the Arnold Bennetts of the world in the first place. The extreme nature of the psychological self-awareness in The Spell is completely dissonant with the seemingly unmotivated randomness of the events which form the threadbare plot of the novel. The narration implicitly claims and enjoys a staggering insight into the thoughts and motivations of the characters; and yet if all this was, in fact, actually available to the foursome of characters in the novel, they would, I’m sure, have acted differently. Couple Robin and Justin both independently sleeping with the much younger rent boy lover of Robin’s own son, for instance, was a quasi-incestuous moment that makes one question what the use of these layers and layers of psychological detail exactly is. 

Still, to be fair to Hollinghurst, this seems to be the novel that he had to write, quite early in his career, in order to get out of his system everything that would have otherwise stood in the way of the brilliance of his later novels such as The Line of Beauty and The Stranger’s Child. And as well, it’s worth putting the novel in its proper context. One of Hollinghurst’s intentions, I think, has always been to properly render gay psychology to make it seem normal to a general reading public. The Spell was released in 1998, and I guess at this time a novel which attends to and presents the psychology of the gays was likely worth having around.  So this novel isn’t really as major an outlier amongst Hollinghurst’s bibliography as I had assumed. It’s more like a typical Hollinghurst novel which couldn’t help but fall under the spell of the modernists; and as for the characters, the spell of an attractive external influence can be difficult to resist.

Image credit: Interview Magazine