However, plot-wise, Michel is merely a stepping-stone for Elio to-spoiler-realize it is Oliver he desperately craves and needs.
The writing here feels more organic there are flashes of the yearning fires that lit Call Me by Your Name, especially in the forward ways Aciman lets this pair more quickly approach and have sex. After a concert, Elio, 32, meets a man twice his age, Michel, and the two engage in a weeks-long tryst. The pace picks up in the next chapter with Elio, who now lives in Paris and plays a lot of Bach but thinks about Oliver more. Eventually, Samuel and Miranda move in together at the former’s seaside home because, why not? On top of all of this, Aciman spells out this unexpected pair’s emotions so baldly it feels like amateur poetry (“You’re oxygen to me, and I’ve been living off methane” “Aren’t those the absolute worst scenarios: the things that might have happened but never did.”) The writing is at worst terrible and at best sappy. The greatest hits of such descriptors include “and yet, despite rumpled look, she had green eyes and dark eyebrows,” and “years ago…I was lost in the world of pre-Islamic Constantinople, yet the sperm cell from her pa’s gonads that would become Miranda hadn’t even been released.” Here Aciman dips into severe male-gaze territory, something that may have been more apparent in Call Me by Your Name had there been female characters to flesh out. Elio’s plans shift, upending his father’s schedule and life as the latter meets, swoons over, and courts Miranda, a woman half his age he meets on the train. Those first 100 pages concern Elio’s father, Samuel, now separated from his wife and traveling to Rome to visit his adult son, who has made a career as a gifted classical pianist. This might make it easy to envy and embody the characters, but the writing is so uninspired it makes any form of connection untenable. Like in his first book, the people we follow in Find Me are highly academic and inexplicably wealthy.
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