André Aciman’s Permanent Vacation

Room on the Sea by André Aciman. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 272 pages. 2025.

In the novels of André Aciman, characters are rarely burdened with anything so tawdry as an office job. If they do have one, as in the case of two well-heeled lovers in Room on the Sea, the central novella in his middling new collection of three, it hovers lightly in the background, providing ample funds to spend in cafés and on seaside hotels. Paul, a recently retired lawyer, and Catherine, a therapist, meet in New York City at jury duty, that wearisome disruptor of routine. Their first exchange recalls a pair of teenagers testing each other’s recently acquired knowledge of moderately successful indie bands. Paul, who is leafing through the Wall Street Journal, tries to glimpse the title of the novel resting on Catherine’s knee. It’s Wuthering Heights, she tells him, “thinking perhaps that he’d probably never heard of it.”

As it turns out, Paul has read it—twice. He shares with Catherine his insider tricks for subtly evading jury selection, and soon they’re eating lunch together at a Chinese restaurant nearby, making thinly veiled digs at their respective spouses and exchanging banalities with disproportionate giddiness. (“Life, he said with a light chuckle. Life indeed, she repeated.”) Like so many of Aciman’s characters, they are seized by attraction but proceed to spend much of the narrative hesitating, equivocating, and musing on the ambivalent nature of desire. They pine and wallow against scenic, expensive backdrops. Removed from any significant limitations, they have no choice but to invent their own.

Aciman is, of course, best known for 2007’s Call Me by Your Name, a wildly popular and critically acclaimed novel that has inspired droves of fan fiction and a 2017 film adaptation directed by Luca Guadagnino and starring Timothée Chalamet and Armie Hammer. Its narrator, Elio, wistfully recalls the summer in the eighties when he was seventeen and fell for a twenty-four-year-old graduate student, Oliver, who came to stay with his family at their idyllic villa in Italy. His parents are expats, and we learn next to nothing about where they live the rest of the year, not that it particularly matters. The reader is immersed in Elio’s narrow, obsessive perspective, which attunes itself to the minutiae of Oliver’s speech and gesture and ruminates on strategies for concealing his overwhelming lust. Aciman is a scholar of the terrible crush, a state that Call Me by Your Name describes with frequent acuity. But for all of the text’s interest in the nuances of Elio’s addled psyche, it is equally uninterested in anything beyond the thrum of his infatuation.

In the earlier days of Aciman’s career as an author, he had not yet acquired the maudlin strain that defines his fiction. His first book, Out of Egypt, which won the Whiting Award in 1995 and branded him as an upmarket literary figure, is a memoir that traces his family’s web of intercontinental migrations as Sephardic Jews buffeted by the shifting political headwinds of the twentieth century. It is populated by colorful, morally ambiguous characters, like his great uncle Vili, a scrappy, cavalier man who opportunistically shifted loyalties during World War II between the fascists of the Axis powers (“He was as devoted to Il Duce as he was to the Pope,” Aciman notes) and the British secret service. Because the memoir’s source material is Aciman’s sociologically rich reality, the messy collision between individuals and the power structures they inhabit is harder to avoid, and Aciman demonstrates an ability to render these dynamics with irony and finesse. In the book’s opening scene, Vili, now in his eighties, gazes upon his Georgian estate in Surrey, awarded to him for his usefulness to the United Kingdom as a spy, and brags that he got everything he wanted. “Arrogant self-satisfaction beamed on his features,” Aciman writes, aware of the sordid history behind his great uncle’s spoils.

By the time Aciman turned his attention to lithe twinks cavorting in the Mediterranean sun, his tune had changed. In an article in the Guardian, he admits that he started working on Call Me by Your Name as a pleasant distraction from a more ambitious project. “One April morning I was dreaming about being in an imaginary Italian villa overlooking the sea,” he writes. “It was a real-estate fantasy: a swimming pool, a tennis court, wonderful family and friends, plus the attendant personnel: a cook, a gardener and a driver.” He wrote the entire book in a few months, which, depending on one’s perspective, is either impressive or indicative of a certain lack of rigor.

The staff, as one might expect from the quotation above, are not given much more dimension than the rest of the scenery, appearing only to facilitate Elio’s interior drama. The gardener, Anchise, is arguably if vaguely presented as a gay-coded figure. Elio’s bratty suspicion toward him—he describes both Anchise and himself, at different points, as “sinister,” and exhibits jealousy after Anchise tends to Oliver’s wounds from a bike wreck—illustrates his self-loathing. (Elio’s father, lest we feel too icky about our youthful hero’s contempt toward the help, explains that Anchise has “a heart of gold.”) Mafalda, the prickly cook, hovers over Elio, usurped in her territory, as he prepares smoothie ingredients for the blender by mincing fruit into tiny pieces, a form of “therapy” in the agonizing interim after he is kissed but not yet fucked by Oliver. Her resistance to Elio’s brief use of the kitchen naturalizes the fact that the family’s hands are generally unsullied by domestic labor. Freed from menial toils, Elio’s family and their guests spend their days trading continental European references—Heraclitus, Bach, Paul Celan—which seem only to ennoble them. Unlike Great Uncle Vili, these are serious, cultured people, liberated from the indignities of earning a living. In a critique of the film adaptation in the Los Angeles Review of Books, D.A. Miller describes their aspirational, irreal lifestyle with cutting accuracy: “In this locus amœnus, there is no work to do; stripped of drudgery and even effort, it has become play—Schiller’s aesthetic state stands achieved.”

In Room on the Sea, Aciman indulges in his vision of benevolent Italian service laborers with even greater gusto. Paul and Catherine’s stints at jury duty in the Manhattan courthouse are punctuated by trips to a nearby café, Da Pirro, helmed by a Neopolitan named Pirro, presumably the owner, who whips up espresso drinks and cornetti. Like any trusty bystander in a grand romance, Pirro is improbably invested in the couple, and his presence reinforces their recurring fantasy of escaping to the titular hotel room in Naples. Pirro loves his hometown with the uncomplicated fervor of the tourist, and goes as far as urging them to travel there immediately. “If I see you again on Monday,” he says, “I know you’ll never go. And it will be so, so sad.” In the same conversation, Pirro alludes to his trips to Fire Island, an indicator of his status as a likely homosexual, further cementing his role as a portal to the exotic, a generous other who manufactures a mood of permissiveness for the couple’s gentle transgressions.

The success of Call Me by Your Name placed Aciman, who has been married to a woman for decades, in an unlikely position as the author of one of the most widely read gay novels of the twenty-first century. Fans of the beautiful boys’ mutual yearning were given little more to feed on in Find Me, Aciman’s 2019 sequel to Call Me by Your Name, which devotes its first half to a May-December coupling between Elio’s aging father, now divorced, and a young woman he meets on a train. Part of the popularity of Call Me by Your Name could be attributed to the rarity of balmy, approachably artistic gay stories as an alternative to moralizing tales of violence and deprivation. Alongside an extensive history of unfavorable representation, narratives portraying queer life as anything other than immiserating have offered a kind of relief, but, weighed down by implicit pleas for tolerance, they can take on an earnest self-importance. They do not always escape a tendency to be two-dimensional, particularly when they are conceived by people without much firsthand knowledge of gay culture in all of its idiosyncrasies.

Take, for example, Elio and Oliver’s romance: cloistered within the nudging acceptance of Elio’s family, it has little relation to the wider gay social world. The only publicly gay characters, an American couple who are dinner guests one night at the villa, are absurd figures, speaking “terrible Italian,” arriving with matching purple shirts and white bouquets, “like a flowery, gussied-up version of Tintin’s Thomson and Thompson twins.” Elio gets queasy at the idea that he might have more in common with these tacky men than he does with his parents.

The film adaptation of Call Me by Your Name, though it replicates the book’s dreamy, fantastical tone, introduces elements of cultural specificity beyond the artifacts of the educated Western élite; it takes place not merely in “the mid-eighties” but in exactly 1983, and in a few crucial scenes the pop music of the era intrudes with its refreshingly synthetic textures. After Guadagnino made the film, he intended, at some point, to direct his own sequels, with the next one explicitly addressing HIV and AIDS, but the project has not materialized. (Chalamet has been busy racking up awards, while Hammer has been excommunicated from Hollywood for a litany of transgressions, including allegations of cannibalism.)

Reflecting on the context of the era, I was reminded of a very different gay novel that takes place in the summer of 1983: Alan Hollinghurst’s The Swimming-Pool Library, in which another young man of leisure pursues a doomed romance (and casual sexual encounters with countless others). What Aciman is too squeamish to touch Hollinghurst is too precise to avoid. The racial and class politics of cruising, for one thing, are thematically fundamental to the story, and the specter of AIDS, relatively new but increasingly unavoidable, is evoked in an early passage with multiple layers of meaning, establishing an uneasy atmosphere. “My life was in a strange way that summer, the last summer of its kind there was ever to be,” the narrator says. “I was riding high on sex and self-esteem—it was my time, my belle époque—but all the while with a faint flicker of calamity, like flames around a photograph, something seen out of the corner of the eye.” (Hollinghurst is attentive not only to the dark corners of gay life but to its charmingly profane colloquial style—he christens the book’s gay night club “the Shaft.”)

Every novel is a kind of fantasy, but some serve different purposes than others. Aciman’s fictions, divorced as they are from a broader social context, are distinctly adolescent, enveloped in a warm fog of prettified angst and nostalgia. When the lovers of his realms encounter difficulties, they are mostly the alluring kind—I want something but am too tortured to pursue it; I got what I wanted and then had complicated feelings about it; the one I love won’t love me back. There are pairs of people whose romantic connections are unassailable; in Aciman’s universe, if you encounter your One True Mate, they will understand you perfectly and possess an uncanny authority on the nature of your inner life. If the two of you cannot be together, you will be haunted by the potency of this love until you exit this mortal coil. These are the sorts of fantasies that cultivate the delicate, fledgling egos of the inexperienced, giving them enough hope, whether about their good fortune or their capacity to aestheticize bad fortune, to continue into the uncertain future. For grown people, to dwell too long on such flights of fancy is suspect.

The first novella in Room on the Sea, The Gentleman from Peru, is a master class is unmitigated wish fulfillment. The protagonist, who is difficult not to read, in part, as an author self-insert, is a dapper sixty-something named Raúl with a green Moleskine notebook, observing a group of youngish adults at—where else?—a seaside hotel in Italy. They find him strange until he reveals to them his magical powers of healing and foresight. He eliminates the pain from a tennis injury in one of their shoulders with a touch of his hand, then correctly guesses obscure personal facts about each member of the group, then smugly performs a few other clairvoyant feats. None of this is off-putting to the young people, who are in awe of the powerful gentleman. After Raúl gives a ponderous speech about the transcendence of finding and losing one’s soulmate, Aciman writes, “The group sat stupefied by Raúl’s words.”

Raúl seems especially interested in one woman, the caustic Margot. He asks her to lunch and shows her a grove of special regional fruit, whose scent seems oddly familiar to her, and an old house he owns nearby but does not live in. All the while he makes vague but pointed allusions to a lost love. They bicker in a faintly sexual manner. In one baffling scene, she is sunbathing topless, and she asks him to rub sunscreen on her shoulder. He rubs the sunscreen over her back, then on her breasts (“‘So they don’t get sunburned,’ he said, smiling”). She notes his erection with an, “Oh, I see.” This is all fine, as it turns out, because she is a reincarnation of the aforementioned lost love, who died in a car accident when she was twenty-two. After the memories return to her in his old house, where they once fell in love, they acknowledge that they can’t be together in this lifetime but may coincide more closely in age in another one. Raúl cannot have exactly what he wants, but he still comes out a winner: he receives the attention and admiration of young people who would otherwise ignore him and an impractical erotic connection that cannot be consummated and therefore ruined. He remains contemplative, virile, and untested. And he still owns at least one choice piece of real estate.

Paul and Catherine, on the other hand, have real trysts, first in a hotel room in New York and then at Paul’s beach house in the Hamptons. The beach house’s refrigerator, we are informed, has been stocked by the cleaning lady before their arrival, which leaves them plenty of time to speak with mind-numbing abstraction about the concept of regret. Instead of going to the room on the sea in Naples, they talk about how they might go to the room on the sea in Naples, which has by now become a plodding metaphor for the unlived life. Coasting on the success of Call Me by Your Name, Aciman seems content to loaf inside picturesque reveries of this sort. In the hands of a more interesting prose stylist, the meandering could work, but the sentences are as pancake-flat as the plots. (The less said the better about Mariana, the third novella in the collection, in which we enter the interminable stream of consciousness of a woman in unreciprocated love with a man she meets at an academy in guess which country.) Reading his recent fiction, one might feel duped in the way of the tourist who eats at a beachfront restaurant only to discover that, because the view is lovely and the foot traffic abundant, the food gets away with being nearly inedible.

In an interview with Peter Spears, who produced the film adaptation of Call Me by Your Name, Aciman recalls, as he often does, the novel’s origin story, this time with one especially telling turn of phrase: “I was just in Italy—a better Italy than I’ve ever known in my life, because it was mine, I was inventing it.” Aciman seems to believe that the fantasy of Italy, and of everything else, is better than the real thing. The sentiment is not wrong so much as it is incomplete. In fantasy, we exercise greater control than we do when our visions collide with the inconvenient fact of other people’s existence. But the dreamscape is an airless place, unfit for permanent residence. Sifting through Aciman’s enervating procession of gorgeous, sun-dappled days in Italy, I was reminded of the dull feeling one gets toward the end of a holiday, the antsy determination to get back into the action of the everyday. The quotidian friction might seem worse, but it has much to teach us. To stay on vacation forever is to live in heaven, which is not to live at all.