A nameless man tells this story: I like to walk through my city. Its places speak to me. Once I met an attractive woman and obsessively wanted her. But I’m timid. She appreciated my friendship but longed for another. She apologized for the necessity of having to hurt me. Although agitated, I was devoted to my own perplexed feelings and have no regrets. On the contrary, I’m grateful for the depth of feeling she ignited in me as well as the humiliation.
This in brief is the premise of Dostoevsky’s short story “White Nights,” published in 1848. Set in St. Petersburg over four nights, the tale has inspired at least seven film adaptations, including those by Luchino Visconti, Robert Bresson, and most recently James Gray in his 2008 American flick “Two Lovers.” On the first page of André Aciman’s new retelling, Eight White Nights, his nameless 28-year old man (occupation unknown) is smitten by Clara Brunschvicg at a lavish party on Christmas eve on Manhattan’s Upper West Side:
“I was learning to disbelieve that this could last another five minutes, because this had all the markings of an unreal, spellbound interlude, when things open up far too easily and seem willing to let us into the otherwise closed circle that is none other than our very own life, our life as we’ve always craved to live it but cheat it at every turn. Our life finally transposed in the right key, retold in the right tense … our life finally made real and luminous because it’s revealed, not in ours, but in someone else’s voice … We spoke about the man in Dostoevsky who meets a woman by an embankment and who for four nights falls madly in love with her.”
For this and the next seven days and nights, the two warily circle each other while meeting for drinks, leaving voice messages (or not), attending a Rohmer film perspective, making fun of others, touching on their pasts, visiting some of Clara’s elderly friends, speaking in a private code. Will they relent and embrace unconditionally? Or are they too cynical, too wise to the confounding substance feeding their gamesmanship? Will they give a name to the blockage between them?
But this is the man’s story, propelled by the turmoil of his self-doubts, suspicions, hurts, dares and desires. Is he recalling these nights, as Dostoevsky’s man does, because the memory enlivens his spirit (during these few days he felt most like himself)? He portrays himself as someone who asks a lot of questions but whose reserve doesn’t inspire or deserve more than glib responses. He is a fumbler at intimacy, a man with few connections to others. Meanwhile, Clara’s purpose is to nudge him towards recognition of their actual situation. Is he now trying to suggest that he learned something profound from her shrewd, unpredictable, piercing parries?
Aciman’s intention is that we observe, ask and wonder about the nature of fascination. As the narrator churns over their every smile, remark, and gesture, the reader enters into the rhythm of his obsession. The object of our fascination is someone whom we recognize — the man calls Clara his “twin.” In his essay “Smile,” psychologist Adam Phillips writes, “When we are fascinated by someone or something we can acknowledge that it may have a cause, but it rarely feels like a choice. Fascination may not be so much a cure for loss, but rather the decision to abolish chance.” In other words, I’m fascinated because I see the lost thing in you, but in the process I’m actually negating your presence as another person.
My contention is that the narrator would like us, in the present moment of his telling, to be fascinated with him — the éclat of his heightened sensibilities, his humbling honesties demanding our submission: “Not only had I been found out, but what was found out about me was being used against me, as if it were a source of weakness and shame … Why did I hate having everything about me found out, exposed, and put out to dry, like soiled underwear?” One begins to suspect that his underlying nature hasn’t yet been “found out” by himself. But Clara spells it out on the sixth night:
“The truth is this … I care for you. Call it what you will – love, if it pleases you. You, however, just want to get me out of your system, and if mistaking this for love helps you, you’ll call it love. I want you in my system, not out. I know what I want from you and I know what I have to give for it. You haven’t got the foggiest idea what you want and certainly not what you’re ready to offer … All you’ve been giving me so far is the hurt, sorry puppy face and the same unasked question in your gaze each time there’s a pause between us. You think it’s love. It’s not.”
Aciman keeps us entwined with the man’s turbulent narrative while giving us just enough reason not to be fascinated with Clara. Their conversation begins to sound silly and shallow. Their ridicule of theater ushers and mothers on cell phones isn’t charming or humorous. Clara may or may not be simply selfish. Is she stringing a former boyfriend along? The man wanders through Straus Park, indulging his sensitivities.
Aciman’s novel suggests that whatever loss the narrator suffers from (ad infinitum) is a lighter and less dangerous thing to bear and encounter than the risky complexities of loving another person. But Aciman knows not to spell this out too carefully. This is an illuminating, artful novel, not a Meg Ryan movie. Aciman has added a contemporary psychological dimension to an archetypal story – without skimping on the feel of actual lives lived among the undistinguished and erotic moments of Eight White Nights.
[Published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux on February 9, 2009, 360 pages, $26.00 hardcover]