'Room on the Sea' review: André Aciman's dreamy romances

What is this thing called love? André Aciman’s signature preoccupation permeates the salt-scented languor of “Room on the Sea,” his new collection of three novellas. Each story contemplates the often tenuous link between love and time, how out of step the two can feel. Aciman explores this electric tension by interrupting his protagonists’ daily routines with, variously, a holiday, jury duty and an academic fellowship. Italy, with its shimmering coasts, coffee and simple cuisine, serves as a point of contact with “shadow-lives waiting in the wings” throughout the book.

Aciman builds the title novella around a meet-cute, a la Nora Ephron, and a plot that unfolds like heavy silk. In a Manhattan jury pool, Paul, a retired Wall Street Journal-toting law partner, notices Catherine, a psychotherapist who -- with a nod to the tragic heroine Aciman has named her after -- is reading “Wuthering Heights.” Though both are married to other people, the two erudite and fit 60-somethings extend their encounters over the week with “fast and fun” lunch breaks at a Chinese restaurant and visits to a cafe where cappuccino and cornetto turn New York into Naples. Eschewing melodrama, Aciman brings Paul and Catherine closer with the plausible misfortune that their respective spouses hate cilantro. While a few of Paul and Catherine’s musings run long, the sweetness and subtext in their banter is delightful.

In the growing swelter of a heat wave and a courthouse with faulty air conditioning, Paul and Catherine shed inhibitions like their fine clothes -- his worsted wool jacket, her linen scarf. Both are grandparents, and theirs is not a courtship that pulls them toward lifelong marriage or children. But if Paul and Catherine wonder about what might have been, Aciman also suggests that lacking traditional goals makes their bond no less meaningful.

“Mariana,” the most visceral of the novellas, further challenges the degree to which time can serve as a measure of love. Based on “Letters of a Portuguese Nun,” an epistolary text from 1669, it takes the form of a letter that Mariana is writing to her fickle former flame. As the raw second-person narration makes clear, her feelings are fresh; they broke up about a month ago. A “good Catholic girl from middle America” in her early 20s, Mariana falls for Itamar on the first night of her fellowship in northern Italy.

Weeks later, without notice, Itamar moves on to another woman, leaving Mariana lost to distress but newly awakened to her sensuality, which Itamar’s touch had surfaced. Nothing focuses the mind like resentment, and Mariana articulates her devastation with precision, writing lines that could be Weezer lyrics: “I try to disappear to be mysterious; you disappear because you’ve got someone else.”

Lovers reunite across lifetimes in the collection’s first novella, “The Gentleman From Peru,” Aciman’s foray into magical realism. A boat’s engine trouble strands rowdy young Americans at a resort on Italy’s southern coast. There they meet a dapper stranger in his early 60s, Raúl, who startles them with his clairvoyant powers. At first, Margot, the brashest of the Americans, bristles at Raúl’s uncanny knowledge of her personal history. She becomes curious, however, about his ability to guide others back in time. In a taboo turn, given their approximately 30-year age difference, Raúl invites Margot to lunch, takes her to swim in a secluded Tyrrhenian bay where the lotus eaters in “The Odyssey” may have lived, and conjures memories of a past life in which Raúl and Margot were “inseparable as Tristan and Iseult.”

The three novellas taken together put forward intriguing ideas about what constitutes connection. Aciman’s appreciation of imperfect, unconventional relationships feels refreshing, even in our unsettled era. Through subtle observations and gentle narrative arcs, he maintains that crushes and heartaches are as urgent as any of the crises that face us. He has a gift for choreographing intimacy.