Call Me By Your Name

Call Me By Your Name is a novel within the romance genre, in which the central conflict and motivator of the plot is love. Call Me By Your Name both uses some romance genre tropes while subverting other elements. In the romance genre, narratives focus on one character as the central protagonist as they navigate the joys and turbulences of romantic relationships. In this novel, Elio is the hero whose perspective informs the reader’s understanding of romance. The conflict of the novel is driven by conflicts of romance: whether Oliver likes Elio in return, whether their lovemaking will change their relationship, and whether their love can stand the test of time.

Notably, in this love story, Elio and Oliver are not under any impression that they will stay together. They have a love that is doomed from the start. But this is where Aciman subverts the tropes of the romance genre. Rather than view a love that has been had and lost as a failure or a tragedy, Aciman depicts Oliver and Elio’s summer of love as deeply formative and consequential. Though their relationship didn’t continue, it permanently changed Elio and helped him through a sexual awakening that informed the way he views himself in the world around him.

Though this novel is about a sexual relationship between two men, identity issues about attraction to the same sex don’t exist for Elio, and both Elio and Oliver experience sexuality on a spectrum, enjoying intimacy with men and women. Oliver alludes to his attraction to men as something he tries to keep control over because his father would not approve, but Elio’s father embraces all love, and Elio is raised to pursue love as love, not as identifiable by gender and societal judgments. Thus, Elio is free to explore the paradoxical nature of love as both brutal and beautiful without an identity crisis about deciding upon his sexuality.

Aciman subverts other romance tropes as well. While many romances throw obstacles in a couple’s way to test their relationships and increase tension, the tension in Call Me By Your Name is mostly front-loaded; the will they/won’t they question only persists so long as Elio and Oliver don’t know about the other’s feelings. Once they are together, though, they exist in passionate harmony; their desires escalate and they consistently deepen their emotional and sexual intimacy. There is no third-act conflict, and anticipated issues such as anti-gay violence or identity struggles never arise. Rather, the couple enjoys a blissful, short relationship and a gracious parting when their allotted time together comes to a close.

With this, Aciman subverts the greatest of all romance tropes, which is the “happily ever after.” Elio and Oliver don’t end up together, but that’s okay. The book emphasizes the value in their relationship as a journey rather than as an end result. Aciman’s focus is on how love teaches people new things about themselves and is worth the pain. This is also an element common to the romance genre—writers of romance from William Shakespeare to Andre Aciman agree that it is better to have loved and lost than not to have loved at all.