Enigma Variations
by André Aciman
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
288 pages, $26.
IN ENIGMA VARIATIONS, novelist and essayist André Aciman continues to explore the themes he first introduced in his splendid 2008 novel Call Me by Your Name. Aciman, a Proust aco-lyte, shows traces of the grand French novelist in his writing, but his latest novel feels more indebted to the Hungarian novelist Péter Nádas (another of Proust’s literary sons), who also explores sex, bisexuality, and psychological ambiguity in his novels. But while Nádas’ writing about sex can stretch to nearly a hundred pages and border on pornography, Aciman favors a more restrained approach. Also, Nádas’ characters operate under the shadow of totalitarianism while Aciman’s move freely in the upper echelons of capitalist society.
In the novel’s opening section, the narrator Paul lustily watches Giovanni, an older crush, as the latter works on an antique desk at the request of Paul’s mother. As in many of his sentences, Aciman imbues the description with an erotic tinge. Paul notes Giovanni “palming his way inside the hump of the bombe-form cylinder desk, groping around until he found the hidden recess, and after some exertion, he fished out a small hidden box.” This brief scene captures what will become a central theme of the novel, which concerns a man who largely watches life from the sidelines. Paul observes others while masking his true desires and emotions. Enigma Variations is a novel about a man who remains unknowable. Paul is an outsider in many ways. He’s an Italian living in America; he forms emotional attachments to women yet lusts after men; he longs for understanding but keeps people at a distance.
Aciman does away with the conventional markers that orient readers in a narrative. Each of the novel’s five sections takes place at a different time, yet we rarely know how much Paul has aged or changed between sections. He’s a passive character through and through. Aciman keeps the novel from stalling with insights into how a repressed introvert manages his life in a way that avoids attention while managing to get what he wants. Paul is a big advocate of not making the first move when interacting with people, preferring to play out possible scenarios in his mind while waiting for the object of his desire to approach. When that person makes a move, Paul has mentally explored so many possibilities that he feels comfortable interacting, because he’s had time to mentally rehearse. When he talks to people, they assume his responses are off-the-cuff and organic, but they are not.
This tendency is on full display in “Manfred,” the novel’s most interior section, in which Paul spends tens of pages observing a young man while creating hypothetical conversations. In lesser hands, these conversations could grow tiresome, but Aciman captures the intense loneliness and longing burning through Paul’s psyche. Paul describes his life “as a screen. I am screen. The real me has no face, no voice, isn’t always with me.” His fictional counter-life becomes his sole expression of what he desires and needs: love without companionship, desire without attachment, and a way of understanding the conflicting, volatile emotions inside his mind.
Paul’s conflicting natures go back to Giovanni, his mother, and his father. As a boy, Paul harbored feelings for Giovanni and assumed his parents were happily married. As an adult, he realizes that Giovanni was his father’s lover. Paul’s parents are scantily described. His father was a hardworking, kindly man, his mother strict and hostile, especially to Giovanni. There’s an implication of unfulfilled incest, but Aciman sidesteps this taboo in favor of something more complicated and less sinister. Paul and his father are more than relatives. They are doubles. Paul notes that “My thoughts were his thoughts, and his thoughts my thoughts.” There are so many variations of the same relationship played out with different characters that we’re led to believe that Paul’s life is a replay of his father’s. Paul’s father inadvertently taught Paul that the only way to live a happy, rich life is through deception. The tragedy is that Paul is bound to repeat his father’s mistakes.
No novel about a totally static character is interesting; we need to believe that a protagonist is at least capable of change. Aciman uses a college friend of Paul’s to shake the emotional wall he’s built up. Chloe, cut from the same cloth as Paul—a loner searching for something unattainable—re-enters his life, challenging him in multiple ways. They have sex, but there’s no romantic spark between them; Aciman’s descriptions of their lovemaking feel labored. Their relationship is built on intellectual stimulation instead of romance. Since it eventually collapses, the relationship ultimately acts as a tragic, distorted mirror of his relationships with Giovanni, his father, Manfred, and other characters. The novel ends with a twist that feels natural to Paul’s pathology. Once again he’s in a deceptive relationship that we understand will leave him unfulfilled.
The one question lingering is why does Paul— a rich, white male living in 2016 America—feel so compelled to hide his life? He never seems to encounter homophobia, and he never really confronts what homosexuality (or bisexuality) means to him or his sense of self. Even his sexual encounters with Manfred are chaste and underwritten. At the start of the novel, Giovanni had explained the hidden compartment to the young Paul and his mother: “Great carpenters … always liked to show they could create hidden spaces in the most impenetrable spots; the smaller the piece of furniture, the more arcane and ingenious the hiding place.” Enigma Variations avoids easy explanations. Aciman has created a container in which his protagonist keeps replaying situations with minor changes to create a study of a man searching for something he cannot find: himself.
Dan Calhoun, a doctoral candidate at the U. of Louisiana–Lafayette, is the author of Safe Sex, a collection of short stories. Contact him at danielrcalhoun@gmail.com.
