I liked Andre Aciman's Harvard Square. It'll be more fun to read if you have lived in the Boston area or spent time in Cambridge, Massachusetts. But if you don't know what Cantabridgian means, don't let that stop you. The characters in this story probably would tell you, if they could, that they didn't know either when they came halfway around the world and landed in Massachusetts. They interacted with the mainstream but did not join it -- at least not yet, as of the time this novel's story is told. They found their footing on outer rings of Cambridge society and did their thing.
Harvard Square is sort of an intellectual's novel, but not limited to that. Scholars in the humanities or social sciences may relate more easily to the main character than other readers. If you don't care to connect with a Harvard doctoral student in literature who is struggling to prepare for his comprehensive exams, then you might not find it a four-star novel. However rarefied the premise, I think this novel rises above it. There is interesting stuff going on here if you roll with the obvious moments of action and also listen, feel, and think about the characters and their struggles and pleasures. I also appreciate the narrative style most of the time.
Aciman's novel depicts early adulthood slices of life that occasionally flare up into memorable moments. One of those is the following, where the protagonist, the graduate student, collapses in relief after earning an affirmative nod from a bigger-than-life figure in his academic career. The student here crosses an intermediate checkpoint in his struggle to close in on passing his doctoral exams on the second go 'round, having failed the first time:
"As I was stepping out of his office, he handed my file to Mary-Lou, saying 'Our friend here could, if he wished, write a dissertation on Chaucer.' Lloyd-Greville was always stingy when it came to praise; he preferred compliments by proxy, by speaking to you via someone else, by not even looking at you. I went home, unplugged my phone, and threw myself on my sunbathed bed totally naked. (p. 158)
Writ large, Aciman shows Harvard Square to have some of Ellis Island's moxie. It is a novel about coming to America from foreign lands. It tracks two educated characters from the Mediterranean, an Egyptian Jew and a Tunisian Arab. The cultural mixing of these two people in their new American home suffuses the novel in way sometimes subtle and intriguing.
At other times, it gets a little pedantic. On the negative side, for example, Aciman probably overdoes it on Kalaj's relentless reactions to America as a culture of excess and artifice. Yes, the character is making a cultural point and we see that. But Kalaj's epithets of "jumbo" and "ersatz" things in American culture get repeated throughout the text like a percussionist who plays too loudly in an orchestra concert, drowning out the other instruments at times.
One character, Kalaj, drives a cab and commands the attention of fellow immigrants around him at the Cafe Algiers in a vocal, tough guy manner. The other (unnamed protagonist) pushes books and stands to accounts before Harvard graduate student supervisors, and when not studying, takes pointers from Kalaj about how to chase women. After one steamy night, it isn't clear which the grad. student liked more, the liaison or the relish of recounting it to Kalaj. Aciman's prose quietly pulls, clicks, and bends here:
"Around four in the morning, though, when the heat in my apartment had become unbearable, we did go upstairs for a short spell and, standing naked on the dark terrace within sight of the neighboring buildings all around us, we watched Cambridge gleam in the misty summer night just before sunrise. It was her idea to go upstairs naked. I loved it. We came back downstairs and made love again. (p. 104)
"She was already gone by the time I woke up the next morning. I put on some clothes and knocked at her door. No one answered. She must have already gone to the library. The smell of her body was still on my sheets, on my skin. I didn't want it to go away. I would shower later, but not now. Without a bite or a cup of coffee, I headed straight for Cafe Algiers. (p. 104)
"Along the way down Brattle Street, I kept wondering why I was rushing. Was I gloating? Had I already forgotten her and was I thinking only of telling Kalaj about her? Why had she left so quietly? I had no answers." (p. 104)
One sub-plot in Harvard Square that got to me gradually was the shifting approach and avoidance between the protagonist and Kalaj. At first, the graduate student protagonist, feeling nerdy, comes as a supplicant to the bombastic Kalaj, who holds court as the king of Cafe Algiers. The cafe serves as kind of a public square for Middle Eastern immigrants in the Boston area -- a subcultural square within the Square of Harvard. The grad. student protagonist takes pleasure in earning Kalaj's favor enough to interrupt some banter he's having with a female employee he knows there. Kalaj halts that, and switches to grant the grad. student the right of way:
"He ignored her and asked about my evening. I told him about the woman in Apartment 42, and how we'd stood naked on the terrace facing all of Cambridge in the dark. He immediately dubbed her la quarante-deux, Miss 42. 'Her name is Linda,' I said. He preferred la quarante-deux." (p. 107)
Later in the novel, the two men reverse who is approaching and who is pursued in their own friendship. Kalaj's fortunes in the New World decline materially; he struggles emotionally; and he looks to the graduate student, who has managed to eke his way forward, for support of various kinds, beginning with a cry for empathy. Says the tough guy Kalaj to the graduate student in a moment of crisis:
"That's because you see the surface, but you don't look underneath. But what about me?" (p. 202)
I found a lot to like in Harvard Square. But also, there were moments that felt not quite there, a bit of a stretch. Ideas, yes for sure. Plot felt believable mostly. The telling, strained in places. Here, for example, a sharp turn gets a little wobbly. The graduate student:
"This finally came to a head one early afternoon later that fall when she took me to meet her parents at the Ritz-Carlton for tea, and all I could think of, as we parked her car and walked toward the hotel, was, Please, God, don't let Kalaj's cab pass by now, don't let him pull over and speak to us, don't let him be anywhere close, because it'd be just like him to turn up as I'm trying to look dapper at the Ritz-Carlton. I was ashamed of him. Ashamed of myself for being ashamed of him. (p. 226)
That grabbed me. Class, ethnicity, friendship and all. But the pile-on of self-loathing got to be a bit much for me in the flow of the moment:
"Ashamed of being a snob. Ashamed of letting others see that what we had in common went far deeper than this surface thing called lousy cash flow. Ashamed that I wasn't allowing myself to own up to how deeply I cared for him and had found it easier to think of us as transient, dirt-poor louts with a penchant for low-life cafe fellowship." (p. 226)
The idea pops throughout the story. People's lives may include multiple identities that may emerge, overlap, and diverge, sometimes in tension. Social philosopher G.H. Mead, in the early 20th century, described this as traffic in "social selves." Aciman's story of social selves in Harvard Square is worth the ride, though it gets a little bumpy and clunky in spots.
Also sometimes, the dialogue and even plot pushed implausibility. For example, Zeinab, a server at the Cafe Algiers, lectured Kalaj on his French grammar in academic jargon before Kalaj the cab driver went to teach French classes at Harvard -- a job that the protagonist had finagled for him in a jam. (p. 242-3) Okay, really?
One point I have to inject here is that the Audible.com reading by Sanjiv Jhaveri, is annoyingly bad. He drapes the Egyptian, Tunisian, and other Middle Eastern characters with Indian accents all out of place. What's more, even the Indian accents sounds fake and exaggerated to my ear, though the American accents are spot on. That wouldn't be the worst thing, except that it highlights Jhaveri's acting in the style of Saturday morning cartoons -- the reading comes off artificial and exaggerated overall. The novel would be better with a different reader, or read it yourself. I was tempted to knock this review down a star or two because of the bad reading, but I decided not to, because the novel is being evaluated, not the delivery means, whether that be Kindle, paper book, or Jhaveri's reading on Audible.com.
In the prologue to Harvard Square, the narrator looks back years later and finds that his memories are brighter and more affectionate than his experience and struggles felt at the time. The power of memory to shape emotions os one of many philosophical riffs I liked in this curious, inviting new piece of literature. Speaking of memory, the novel grew on me and by the end, I enjoyed looking back on it just a bit more than I had enjoyed reading it. If nothing else, looking back makes it easier to shake off Jhaveri's Audible.com performance of the text and let the novel itself settle in my mind -- and unsettle me in places. Four stars.
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Top reviews from other countries
Jade
Gorgeous novel full of life and love
Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on August 1, 2018P. Danton De Rouffignac
Aciman's best to date
Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on April 28, 2014ALEJANDRO CARDEÑA MARTINEZ
Wonderful reading, cosmopolite, lovely style!
Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on April 11, 2022
