Call Me by Your Name

By Andre Aciman

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 248 pages, $23

In "Death in Venice," describing his main character's obsession with a lissome boy he has observed, Thomas Mann wrote that "in his infatuation, he wanted simply to pursue uninterrupted the object that aroused him, to dream of it when it was not there, and, after the fashion of lovers, to speak softly to its mere outline."

That is very much the affective atmosphere of Andre Aciman's "Call Me by Your Name," something of the Mann story in reverse, in which the narrator relates in later life his desire as an adolescent to secure--what?--his own desire, his aesthetic and romantic longing, in the person of a slightly older man, a house guest at his family's compound in Italy.

In the most basic sense, "Call Me by Your Name" is a coming-into-homosexual-awareness novel that shares commonalities with works by Edmund White, David Leavitt, Tom Spanbauer and many others. Yet that is a compromising view if considered exclusively, for even though Elio, the narrator, tells us early on that "I had wanted other men my age before and had slept with women," much else in the book argues toward ambivalence and the impetuousness of youth as complicating motivational factors.

Then, too, in its Mann-like focus on artistic sensibilities and its obvious playing with Romantic versus romantic inclinations, "Call Me by Your Name" is a meditation on the tenuous and sometimes evanescent underpinnings of desire, almost irrespective of its object. Elio is 17 during much of the recalled action and has mixed responses to the fleeting sexual contacts in his overall engagement with Oliver, the 24-year-old academic who takes up residence with Elio's family to work on an Italian translation of a book he has written. (Elio's father is a well-known professor who sponsors one such guest every summer, to help with their academic advancement.)

Additionally, Elio is recalling a summer fling from a vantage point 20 years on, and while those weeks form the emotional center of the book, he and Oliver went on to lead very separate lives. Elio, and apparently Oliver, had physical relations with young women, too, that summer, and the young men's approach-avoidance behavior toward each other called into question the meaning and context of their feelings, leaving an uneasy residue the succeeding years did little to abate. Elio wished to clear the air at the time but was told by Oliver," `we can't talk about such things. We really can't.' "

It has reached the point where Elio must talk about such things, though, and Aciman, cleverly, has made this account a separate telling from the diary Elio kept at the time, which is referenced occasionally and allows the author to compare two Elios, the present mind and past mind. Readers may remember the book that first brought Aciman attention as a writer, the memoir "Out of Egypt," a chronicle of his Jewish family's arrival in and eventual exit from Alexandria. Aciman is across the Mediterranean here, in his first novel, but a Diasporic sense remains, as Elio relates that his family "were not conspicuous Jews" but rather " `Jews of discretion,' to use my mother's words." When Elio spots Oliver wearing a Star of David on a gold chain, he reflects that outside the family, Oliver "was probably the only other Jew who had ever set foot in B."

Reference to towns like "B." and "N." are as specific as Elio's shorthand gets geographically, but we are near the site of Percy Bysshe Shelley's drowning (the early death of a Romantic), which means the bay of Spezia, in Liguria, northwestern Italy. "Cor cordium" ("heart of hearts") is inscribed on Shelley's gravestone, and the concept itself serves as a leitmotif in Aciman's novel, which is literary in its narrative style and its allusions to other writers. Not only is Dante quoted, but in a haphazard, circuitous night in Rome worthy of "La Dolce Vita," Elio runs into a Dante street performer (who is brawling with a Nefertiti impersonator).

Elio also reads Italian poet Giacomo Leopardi (another Romantic) and German-Jewish poet Paul Celan (another drowning), and comes to think of his connection to Oliver in Celanian phrasing: "Zwischen Immer und Nie. Between always and never." His late-adolescent voice is confessional and engaging, realistically self-contradictory, too, as his feelings frequently jackknife to become their own opposite hours later. Even his consort takes a jab at what Elio refers to as his "operatic sentimentalism."

The book of Oliver's that is being translated into Italian is on Heraclitus, the 6th Century B.C. philosopher who, loosely, saw the world as opposites replacing each other in transformational changes--a point of view that ties directly to themes in "Call Me by Your Name," and even the novel's title. There is cross-dressing here, but it is Elio and Oliver (whose names are virtually anagrams of each other) wearing each other's clothing, and in passion Oliver suggests to Elio, " `Call me by your name and I'll call you by mine.' "

Indeed, Elio meditates on individuals who need to "become so totally ductile that each becomes the other" and concludes that Oliver "was my secret conduit to myself." And he wonders, "Whom else would I ever be able to call by my name" without it being "a derived thrill, an affectation." Talking to his father, an accepting sort whose eyes know what they see when it comes to Oliver and his son, Elio thinks of a quotation from Emily Bronte: " `he's more myself than I am.' "

Probably all loves appear to be unique from the inside. It is a challenge for any writer to convey ardor without risking silliness, but Aciman balances Elio well on his psychic precipice. In his negative moments, Elio "felt queasy, as if I had been sick and needed not just many showers to wash everything off but a bath in mouthwash. . . . It was not him I hated--but the thing we'd done." Desire and shame were "the legacy of youth, the two mascots of my life," he reports.

Descriptions of sexual acts in "Call Me by Your Name" tend to be direct and not elliptical (one scene involving a piece of food might remind some of Philip Roth's "Portnoy's Complaint") but are far from prurient, and while they loom large to Elio in a psychological sense, they do not occupy much of the novel. Elio is a good tour guide, too, with an ability to convey the pleasant torpor of his Italian days, his bike rides into town, his swims, the surround of local characters:

"I loved the afternoons best: the scent of rosemary, the heat, the birds, the cicadas, the sway of palm fronds, the silence that fell like a light linen shawl on an appallingly sunny day. . . . This was my balcony, my world."