Aciman Falters in 'Nights'

Hiding in the greenhouse of a lavish apartment on the Upper West Side of New York, the protagonist of “Eight White Nights” sees his life flash before his eyes as he tastes a spicy hors d’oeuvre. This moment appears to be directly inspired by Proust’s episode of the madeleine—in fact, André Aciman’s entire second novel reads like an exercise in bringing a feverish Proustian narrative to twenty-first century Manhattan. This novel, which blurs the boundaries between supermarket romance and literary fiction, mainly relies on Aciman’s ease at spinning together long, hypnotic sentences to fuel the heavily psychological and minimally plot-driven narrative. However, the same characteristics that give Aciman his writerly credentials—his finely tuned cultural references and the delicate register of his artistic understanding—are trivial ornaments that cannot disguise the stagnant quality of the central love story. Though the characters are undoubtedly clever and sardonic, their emotional interplay fails to conjure the feeling of sublimation that Aciman is striving to evoke.

The plot is unabashedly gimmicky, clashing with Aciman’s rhythmic and ornamented sentences. “Eight White Nights” opens with a (heavily repeated) hook—“I am Clara”—with which the main love interest introduces herself. It then breaks into an eight-part narrative, in which each part chronicles a different night that the unnamed narrator spends with Clara. He meets her while lurking behind the tree at a Christmas party and is instantly and fatally drawn towards her. Smart and mean, Clara scintillates with brilliance and bristles with animosity and fragility. She and the protagonist constantly dance around each other as they try unsuccessfully to achieve intimacy.

The bulk of the narrative follows the protagonist and his longings, desires, and solipsistic rants as he yearns after Clara and analyses her every gesture. Though laden with the narrator’s passionate obsession for Clara, “Eight White Nights” chronicles an essentially chaste love. Aciman denies the reader the full range of the sensuous prose that he unquestionably mastered in his first novel, “Call Me By Your Name,” and consequently creates a more emotionally tentative work.

Aciman is attempting to pin down the feeling of imminent loss; the moment of insane delirium one feels while balancing on the edge of a precipice. For Proust, that loss surrounds mortality and the desire to mentally ward it off at all costs; for the narrator, it is simply a question of “lying low” and warding off the cruelty of lovers. Yet the protagonist and Clara, caught in their self-involved and unspectacular web of emotions, are too banal for Aciman’s trick to work, and the protagonist’s dense, slogging thoughts form a thicket of angst that paralyses the narrative. He despairingly thinks, “It occurred to me that rehearsing loss to dull the loss might bring about the very loss I was hoping to avert.” This constant act of stagnant, empty rehearsal is emblematic of the psychological development in the novel—the characters constantly strain towards expression, retracting or repeating statements, but never move towards a new idea or significant development.

The only dynamic motif in “Eight White Nights” is the coded language that the lovers invent in order to communicate with each other. One of Aciman’s more inspired devices, it infuses the relationship between Clara and the protagonist with the warmth and poignancy of two kindred spirits attempting to invent a hermetic universe for themselves. They invent the terms “otherpeoples” and “Shukoffs” in their very first conversation, referring to the mass of boring, unimaginative humans who surround them. Their conversation continues, full of earnest jargon about “trenches,” “lying low,” and “pandangst,” which is supposed to encode their feeling of deep emotional vulnerability. Clara and the narrator escape concrete thoughts and feelings by inventing these hollow terms, constantly side-stepping each other in a never-ending verbal jousting match. Building a universe out of words, secret terms and code phrases is a compelling and imaginative way to portray a love affair. However, when the narrator deploys phrases as ridiculous as ‘Vishnukrishnu Vindalu moment’ with absolute earnestness, the story begins slipping off the emotional precipice on which Aciman wants to balance.

In order to give context to the disembodied desire of his two lovers, Aciman references a bygone European past, but manages to trivialize it by reducing it to a simple, romantic picture of the Old Country. Both Clara and the protagonist come from an Eastern European, Jewish background and move about in a world with scattered references to Dostoevsky, Rilke, Rohmer, St. Petersburg, Bellagio and Byzantium—one that is faded around the edges like a sepia photograph.

Aciman’s shower of allusions is too perfunctory to do justice to the ideas and places he is evoking. The nod to a different cultural context is shallow, but additionally becomes disturbing when Aciman uses metaphors reminiscent of the pain and trauma caused by World War II to describe the main character’s somewhat unconvincing anguish at Clara’s rejection. He morosely declares, “I’ll always hate you for this, for bringing me to the abyss and forcing me to stare down, the way they force a detainee to watch the brutal execution of his cellmate.” His metaphor not only fails spectacularly, but also has troubling ethical and historical implications.

Aciman’s effort in “Eight White Nights” to imitate Proust and constantly dwell within thoughts, metaphors, code-phrases, and imagined scenes of passion is misguided. The prose is feverish and obsessive; though his writing occasionally reaches lyrical heights, the banality of his subjects often overpowers. It particularly raises the question of whether the flowery, (pand)angsty voice of the narrator isn’t just Aciman’s projection of how he believes women want men to think, feel and obsess over them, since there doesn’t appear to be much emotional impetus for the narrator to act on beyond the overwhelming longing and fear he feels for Clara. Ultimately, “Eight White Nights” is too artificial on all its fronts to fulfill Aciman’s ambition of creating an evocative, transcending love story.

—Staff writer Sophie O. Duvernoy can be reached at sduvern@fas.harvard.edu.