In the novels of André Aciman, characters are rarely burdened with anything so tawdry as an office job. If they do have one, as in the case of two well-heeled lovers in Room on the Sea, the central novella in his middling new collection of three, it hovers lightly in the background, providing ample funds to spend in cafés and on seaside hotels. Paul, a recently retired lawyer, and Catherine, a therapist, meet in New York City at jury duty, that wearisome disruptor of routine. Their first exchange recalls a pair of teenagers testing each other’s recently acquired knowledge of moderately successful indie bands. Paul, who is leafing through the Wall Street Journal, tries to glimpse the title of the novel resting on Catherine’s knee. It’s Wuthering Heights, she tells him, “thinking perhaps that he’d probably never heard of it.”
As it turns out, Paul has read it—twice. He shares with Catherine his insider tricks for subtly evading jury selection, and soon they’re eating lunch together at a Chinese restaurant nearby, making thinly veiled digs at their respective spouses and exchanging banalities with disproportionate giddiness. (“Life, he said with a light chuckle. Life indeed, she repeated.”) Like so many of Aciman’s characters, they are seized by attraction but proceed to spend much of the narrative hesitating, equivocating, and musing on the ambivalent nature of desire. They pine and wallow against scenic, expensive backdrops. Removed from any significant limitations, they have no choice but to invent their own. (Crispin Long)
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