Sequels

If you search my blog for "sequel," you'll find a number of posts offering my opinion.  I'm against them.

I'm not referring to the books that were intended as a series to begin with -- Durrell's Alexandria Quartet, Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, Pullman's His Dark Materials, Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu.  Nor am I referring to books written years later as a sequel to or reinterpretation of a novel written by a different author -- though I have my doubts about those, as well -- like Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea.  No, what I really have in mind are the frequent instances where an author writes a wildly popular novel, so popular that many of its readers demand to know "what happened next," and his publisher -- I'm speculating -- tells him "Don't be a fool, give them what they want -- there's gold in them thar hills.

Which is exactly what I expected of a sequel to André Aciman's novel Call Me By Your Name, reviewed in this blog in July 2009.  Reader reviews on Amazon and in Goodreads howled their disapproval of the downbeat ending to the novel, or, even if they appreciated Aciman's craftsmanship, begged for a sequel with a "happy ending."  We see the same phenomenon with other novels, whether their endings are happy or tragic.  If the protagonists are appealing, many readers treat them as real people, as though the author knows what happened to them next, and is obligated to tell us.

In a well-written novel, the author knows the story he wants to tell, and tells it.  If the ending doesn't satisfy the reader, it's not because of oversight on the author's part.  The story conceived by the author demands that "unsatisfying" ending.  And Call Me By Your Name is a very good novel by an excellent author.  Readers have obviously wanted Oliver and teenaged Elio to get together again.  But Aciman's Proustian story was told from the point of view of a middle-aged man recalling memories from twenty years after the fact of his first love, a summer romance that ended with that summer.

It was over, and twenty years later both Oliver and Elio knew it was over.

So when I saw a review of Find Me, Aciman's sequel, in today's New York Times, my heart sank.  But having read the review, I have hope.  Apparently, Oliver and Elio don't even appear in the novel during the first half; the story is told from the point of view of Elio's father, now divorced from Elio's mother and caught up in a love affair of his own.  (This is odd, because in the final, farewell scene of the earlier book, where the two say goodbye once more, twenty years after "that summer," and five years after the events in Find Me, the mother still lives on, somewhat dementedly, at the family home, and a portion of the father's ashes are buried on the premises.)

Do the "boys" say farewell once again in Find Me?  The reviewer doesn't give away the ending, but notes that the focus of the book is on "the come down," the "second act" of a love affair.  Cleverly, the reviewer notes:

"We're not going to feed off the past, are we?" Oliver asks toward the end of the novel, and this question can almost be read as Aciman's meta-commentary on the existence of "Find Me" itself.

Near the end of the earlier book, Elio mused to himself that Oliver:

was and would forever remain, long after every forked road in life had done its work, my brother, my friend, my father, my son, my husband, my lover, myself.  In the weeks we'd been thrown together that summer, our lives had scarcely touched, but we had crossed to the other bank, where time stops and heaven reaches down to earth and gives us that ration of what is from birth divinely ours.  We looked the other way.  We spoke about everything but.  But we've always known, and not saying anything now confirmed it all the more.  We had found the stars, you and I.  And this is given only once.

No wonder so many wanted a sequel.  But he had already told us in this musing, fifteen years after their summer together, (and in the same year as Find Me apparently takes place), that this had been "given only once."

And, as the reviewer tells us,

we are given a book that explores what can happen when your life gets away from you, when you realized just how much time you've wasted.  It may not make for the stuff of glistening cinema, but it strikes an affectingly melancholy chord.

So maybe Aciman once more knew what he was doing; maybe he resisted the urge to sell out! And yet, if Find Me only shows the disillusionment that comes with age and the passage of time, shows how one can't be seventeen forever, shows the future sadness already strongly suggested in Call Me By Your Name -- why bother? I'm happy if the new book remains true to the original novel, that it doesn't in effect trash it, but do we need it?

But I'm not being fair; I haven't read it. The book isn't high on my "to read" list, but I'm sure I will read it.  Because I've read almost everything Aciman has published -- his essays repeatedly, his memoir Out of Egypt several times, and, so far as I recall, all of his novels except Eight White Nights, which I began once, but in which I got bogged down.  (Maybe I'll even tackle that again one of these days!)