The success of André Aciman’s Call Me by Your Name, his gay coming-of-age novel set in an idealised corner of northern Italy — first published in 2007 but made famous by Luca Guadagnino’s cinematic treatment a decade later — turned a little-known Italian-American author and academic into a hugely popular confectioner of wistful literary romances.
Last year, Aciman published The Gentleman from Peru, a supernatural love story played out on the beaches of the Amalfi Coast. And his new novella, Room on the Sea, choreographs a dance of polite flirtation between two early-stage pensioners over one heatwave week in the heart of Manhattan. It’s another of Aciman’s what-if narratives of literate maybe-maybe-not lovers and something of an advert for the charms of New York’s eateries.
The premise is pure screwball comedy. On a Monday morning in the waiting hall of a city court, 200 potential jurors sit in the rising heat waiting to be chosen or dismissed from the roster of trials. Among them are two sixtysomethings: Catherine, a psychiatrist (reading Wuthering Heights) and Paul, a lawyer (reading the Wall Street Journal).
They strike up a conversation and leap to judgments. “She could read him like a book,” thinks Catherine. “Wall Street, Park Avenue, Ivy League — arrogant, self-satisfied, clearly prejudiced, and knows it too.” With lawyerly precision, Paul sums her up as “definitely lefty”.
Their banter and observations — legal strategies, the taste of coriander, how to wear socks — suggest an attraction. Food does the rest. On lunch breaks they visit a Chinese restaurant, the kind of place neither of their spouses would choose, and eat fried dumplings. At an Italian café they discuss their pasts, presents and a shared love of Naples over espressos and cornetti.
A barista called Pirro sweet talks them and the sun continues to shine. This amiable romcom waltz of words — partly innocent, partly conspiratorial — is amusing in a gentle way, with the pair eventually sounding “like a pair of old-school safecrackers synchronizing watches before blowing up the wall to the bank vault”.
But the tempo increases at an unrealistic pace. By Wednesday, the conversation is veering into “sticky” territory about jetting off together. The titular room is a make-believe space overlooking the Bay of Naples, inspired by Paul’s visits to a Neapolitan hotel and a painting discovered by the duo in a SoHo gallery. For Paul and Catherine, it becomes a fabulous retreat for their imagined future. Meanwhile, their partners remain offstage, little more than vague disappointments that justify the courtroom courtship.
Aciman strums his usual chords. Jury duty creates a break from his characters’ everyday routines, allowing for anomalous behaviour. Summer holidays served a similar purpose in Call Me by Your Name and The Gentleman from Peru. And once again, Italy, here seen from both a physical and biographical distance, is outrageously romanticised.
He also delivers more of his stock characters: well-heeled but emotionally and sexually unfulfilled liberal arts graduates, their ennui cushioned by holiday homes, academic tenure and tailored outfits. This can make them hard to like. Paul and Katherine, both in late middle age, have none of the usual indignities of that stage of life: no financially troubling redundancies, hip replacements or unsightly flab. Instead, Paul has a cottage in the Hamptons and Katherine has the “hands of a pianist”.
Room on the Sea is a fantasy within a fantasy — an unlikely last-chance liaison underpinned by daydreams of the Mediterranean — with multiple levels of wishful thinking that might have been insufferable if it weren’t for Aciman’s ability to produce witty and memorable moments. The sum of these is a contemporary fairy tale, a kind of Brief Encounter with pastries and the hope of “retirement-plus”.
The author — who has taught Proust at Princeton — is romantic in a distinctly 19th-century fashion. Considering our digitally connected, romantically disenfranchised 21st-century lives, that approach doesn’t allow for much realism. Even so, one can enjoy this short tale rather like one enjoys cannoli: not nourishing perhaps, but certainly moreish.
Room on the Sea by André Aciman Faber £12.99, 176 pages
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