André Aciman’s novels may be steeped in modern, metropolitan New York but they can feel curiously old-fashioned. The characters dine at fancy restaurants, throw lavish dinner parties, zoom around in taxis, pursue the complex sexual entanglements befitting members of the smart set—in short they have the world at their fingertips—and yet the core sensibilities at play, intricately traced in the exquisite digressions and repetitions of Mr. Aciman’s prose, owe more to older literary traditions: coming-of-age novels of the 1960s or ’70s; psychological romances in the mold of Ivan Turgenev or Stefan Zweig; even the feints...