Why Should I Call You By My Name?

A new first novel, titled Call Me By Your Name, has been getting some attention lately because of its frank and highly erotic sex scenes between two men. That a novel features two men having hot sex isn't shocking. But that this trenchant portrait of consuming homosexual desire was written by a man who is married and has children, as its author Andre Aciman is and does, may come as a bit of a surprise.

The structure and style of the novel can't help but invite autobiographical thoughts. The narration is in a heavy, breathy first person. The tone is memoiristic, suffused with nostalgia for lost desire. The book's lovestruck narrator is an Italian man looking back at when he was a teenager and had an affair with a slightly older American guest who'd come to stay with his family for the summer. Much of the book consists of the young narrator's fantasies about the things he'd like to do or have done to him while in the loving company of his American friend. When the narrator's desires are consumated, (one memorable scene involves a peach flavored with an unusual marinade) the scenes are recounted in the kind of intimate detail that seemingly you'd have to have lived to know about.

"How can a straight man have written THAT?" As I began reading the book, this was also the question I kept asking myself. It's only natural. We live in an age in which we suspect our non-fiction writers of lying and our fiction writers of telling the truth.

Having just finished the book, I have no way of knowing whether Aciman is gay, straight, bi, or Martian. I do know that Aciman has convincingly captured moments of homosexual desire, but this in itself does not signify that the author shares the feelings he writes about. Haven't there been women who've written convincingly of men's sexual desires and vice versa? Whatever happened to the concept of the empathetic imagination? It's possible for a man to write from the point of view of a woman without being accused of being a woman himself. So why is it that when heterosexual writers write from the point of view of homosexual characters, (or for that matter when heterosexual actors play homosexual characters) we don't call these people talented artists, but instead closet cases?

What troubled me about Aciman's novel was not the sexuality of its author, but the unacknowledged psychosis of its main character. Aciman wants us to believe that his narrator is haunted by his brief teenager summer affair for years after it took place. Fine. What I'm not willing to buy into is that we as readers should somehow celebrate an adult who clings to an adolescent romantic fantasy version of reality (in this case, a short but sweet infatuation fulfilled) to a point that goes beyond obsession to psychological dysfunction. Many people have intense physical or spiritual relationships that ended. Occasionally we look back at them and feel regret, even loss. And then we go on with our lives. If we can't let go of the past, it isn't because the past was so wonderful. It's because there's something wrong with who we are in the present, and so we feel the need to assign a value to the past that it doesn't have. Our lives are more than our lost loves, or even our lost lusts. This is the insight that I found troublingly absent in Aciman's highly-charged but ultimately sentimental novel.

It's interesting that in this novel, Aciman references Wuthering Heights, a classic of romantic literature that featured as its hero and heroine a couple of good candidates for the loony bin. The fact that Bronte shows us that Heathcliff and Catherine were not in full command of their senses doesn't make their love story less powerful, but more. By contrast, the hero of Call Me By Your Name's lifelong obsession with his first fuck seems not only disproportionate but also worthy of dissection by a qualified shrink, rather than the lovingly detailed tribute that Aciman has created.