We’re All in Love with an American Grad Student: Find Me (2019)
By Nikita Mujumdar
This review contains spoilers for this novel, its prequel, and, inexplicably, Fleabag
Hemingway reportedly once described himself and the German actress Marlene Dietrich as “victims of unsynchronized passion”—somehow their fortunes never aligned, and despite a lengthy correspondence and mutual adoration, they were never lovers. André Aciman’s latest novel Find Me (2019), is packed to the rafters with just such unsynchronized passion. Although the central narrative follows three couples, it is littered with stories of unrequited love, love gone awry, and love that was simply never realized, because, as the author laments halfway through the first chapter, “time and life are not in sync.”
And yet this is not a piece of writing that can be read in isolation. Throughout the novel there are frequent references to the events of Aciman’s earlier work Call Me By Your Name (2007), which recounts the story of 17 year-old Elio, who falls in love with Oliver, an American grad student who spends a summer with him and his family at their home in the Italian countryside. Much to Elio’s dismay, their torrid love affair comes crashing to a halt when Oliver moves back home and announces his intention to get married. It is likely that that would have been the final word, had the book not been catapulted into the spotlight nearly a decade later, when it was adapted into a movie featuring scene after scene of Armie Hammer in short shorts.
Find Me, it then seems, was written in response to fans clamoring for a sequel that would continue to follow the relationship between the two protagonists. In that respect, it falls woefully short. There is scant mention of either Elio or Oliver for the first two chapters, which are devoted entirely to the romance that blossoms between Elio’s father Sami, and Miranda, a young woman that he meets on a train. It is a relationship that beggars disbelief—within a few hours of meeting, the two are waxing poetically about love and Dostoevsky, and emphatically planning a life together. There is something absurd, almost manic about these characters and the rapidity with which their story progresses, and readers are left on tenterhooks about the details that they came for, skimming through descriptions of Sami and Miranda’s physical relationship for any mention of the young men from the prequel. The New Yorker puts it best: “Never has a whirlwind romance felt so interminable.”
Although Sami does occasionally mention his son in passing, Elio himself doesn’t appear until the very end of the second chapter. The next section outlines his relationship with Michel, a much older man who shares his fondness for classical music. Once again, the entire courtship seems like an unnecessary diversion, and although Elio brings up his past, his memories include a boy who he found fascinating when they were nine years old, and a foreign exchange student of little significance. Aciman introduces multiple anecdotes within this story, perhaps to drive home the overarching point that he is trying to make about how it is possible for love to transcend time and space.
Oliver, fans of Armie Hammer will be disappointed to learn, only makes an appearance in the penultimate chapter. When he does, he is married, still seeking out affairs with younger men and women, and altogether virtually unrecognizable. Gone is the brusque grad student with his careless, Daisy Buchanan-esque attitude towards love. He is replaced by a man who sighs, and fantasizes, and holds a vigil on Elio’s birthday each year to imagine what their life would have been like if they’d stayed together.
Ultimately, Find Me has none of the easy charm of its prequel. A part of the appeal of Call Me By Your Name was its universality—surely at some point in our lives we all fall in love with an American grad student doing research abroad? In his first novel, Aciman captured the emotions that surround a first love, fraught with uncertainty and confusion, that develops over time; and the heartbreak that follows when that love goes unrequited. Although they are fundamentally the same people, few, if any, of the characters in Find Me are as relatable. Perhaps this is due to Aciman’s decision to write from the point of view of three different characters (Call Me By Your Name is narrated entirely by Elio), who are all subsequently reduced to the same love-lorn trope.
It does eventually resolve the matter of Elio and Oliver. Some twenty years after the events of the first novel, the pair are finally reunited, traveling around the Mediterranean together and trying to make up for lost time. They both declare that none of the relationships that they had formed in the years that they had been apart mattered—“our years between then and now were merely a hiccup in that long itinerary called time,” Elio says. “If neither of us sought out the other, it was only because we had never really parted.”
One of the most stunning depictions of unrequited love this past year has been Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag, which ends when the titular character finds herself abandoned at a bus stop by a hot priest, who decides that although he loves her, he has no place for her in his life. Despite the show’s popularity, Waller-Bridge has insisted (for now) that there won’t be a third season, and viewers can only speculate about whether Fleabag and the hot priest’s paths will cross again.
Unlike Waller-Bridge, Aciman clearly isn’t a fan of Schrodinger’s Conclusion: “The no-ending ending [is] modernism at its foulest,” he writes. However, although the denouement of Find Me is conclusive, it is less than satisfying, as though it was written to pander to an audience that longs for a storybook ending. In the final chapter, Oliver wonders aloud whether “some of our fondest desires end up meaning more to us unrealized than tested.” Perhaps that’s something that everyone who waited years for this sequel should consider.
Nikita Mujumdar recently graduated from the London School of Economics, where she studied Economic History and hung out at the pub. Her interests include historical fiction, 20th century poetry, pirates, the Duchess of Cambridge, and falling in love at Christmas. Follow her on Twitter @NikitaWhoWrites for endless sub-tweeting.
