Snobs of Extraordinary Ability

Harvard Square

By André AcimanW W Norton & CompanyFor about a year after college I worked as a paralegal for a law firm in Midtown that specialized in immigration. My clients were applying for green cards under a provision reserved for “aliens of extraordinary ability”—would-be Americans whose immigration would be of special value to the United States, because they were unusually intelligent (or unusually wealthy and unusually willing to spend their money in our country). If they successfully petitioned for this “extraordinary” designation, they were able to skip the green card lottery and swiftly obtain permanent legal status to work here. Most of my clients were a magnitude of order smarter than I was—chemists and biologists and engineers heading their own labs at Ivy League Institutions. One client had discovered a way to make stem cells selectively build hairs and, thereby, reverse baldness (the first step toward figuring out how to induce stem cells to build lungs and hearts); another was a leading researcher for IBM, working on a team that hoped to produce the first fully functioning artificial brain; a neuroscientist and neuroengineer, he’d discovered how memories are stored within the brain, and how to simulate this storage within an electronic device.Our firm, as most do, charged several thousand dollars to assemble and file the petitions. Although the requirements for the application aren’t necessarily too demanding, our clients could never have obtained their green cards without our help. Like many government agencies, the United States Citizenship and Immigration Service operated with its own form of English, heavily accented in bureaucratese, impossible for anyone outside the system to understand, and thorny even for those who’d been working for years within the field of immigration law. Essentially, our clients paid us because we had access to the proper vocabulary, and knew how to communicate with it. This was a paradoxical language, one with loose definitions but specific usages. For example, regarding the criterion that an applicant must have “sustained” recognition in their profession, USCIS explains:

In determining whether the beneficiary has enjoyed “sustained" national or international acclaim, bear in mind that such acclaim must be maintained. (According to Black’s Law Dictionary, 1585 (9th Ed, 2009), the definition of sustain is “(1) to support or maintain, especially over a long period of time; 6.  To persist in making (an effort) over a long period of time.”)  However, the word sustained does not imply an age limit on the beneficiary.  A beneficiary may be very young in his or her career and still be able to show sustained acclaim...There is also no definitive time frame on what constitutes “sustained.”

After a few months I became so immersed in USCIS language that it began to override my normal vocabulary. At bars with friends, I would transition between sentences with whereases and heretofores. Using this other language—an English that wasn’t quite English, wasn’t quite human—was my real-life introduction to a concept that until then I’d only understood abstractly: that language is closely linked to personality, that to some extent we all go around speaking individual languages, that success in many areas depends on the ability to suss out the intricacies of someone else’s speech. (Describing why a couple has divorced in the film Scenes from a Marriage, Liv Ullmann’s character says, “They didn’t speak the same language.” The problem with Martha and George in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf may be that they share their language too closely.) In the case of immigration law, language—far beyond a client’s potential value to the country—dictated the difference between citizenship and rejection.Thinking of the legal terminology now—“aliens of extraordinary ability” in particular—brings back not just memories of the boilerplate I copied out every day, but an entire era of my life. I hear the words, or chant them mentally, and back comes the memory of my boss, who walked around in her socks speaking badly of the government’s top immigration liaison; back comes Samantha, our office’s administrator, who every time the phone rang would ask aloud, “Now who the fuck is this?”; back comes the small crumpled pile of paper towels by the men’s bathroom door, deposited by the dentist who refused to touch the handle. “Aliens of extraordinary ability” is both microscope and specimen, a lens through which part of the past is filtered, and yet also itself a part of that past. A common enough phenomenon—memory via vocabulary—but one that remains uniquely evocative. 

*“The narrator of Out of Egypt has a liquid and unsteady foothold [on his past],” wrote André Aciman, who authored Out of Egypt, a memoir, and was its narrator. “It is not even Egypt or the things he remembers that he loves. What he loves is just remembering, because remembering insures that the present won’t ever prevail.”And it’s true: as his career has progressed, Aciman has established himself as a great enthusiast of memory, its happiest prisoner. In essays, memoirs, and novels, he sets his characters and himself with the task of vividly recalling scenes from the past, as a means to explain the present, or maybe just to escape it for a while. Usually in his work it’s a single word or phrase that opens up the reverie.“At that moment he was fulminating against white Americans,” says the narrator at the beginning of Harvard Square, Aciman’s latest novel.

Americans loved all things jumbo and ersatz, he was saying. As long as it was artificial and double the value if you bought five times the size you’d ever need, no white American homemaker could resist. Their continental breakfasts are jumbo-ersatz, their extra-long cigarettes are jumbo-ersatz, their huge steak dinners with whopping all-you-can-eat salads are jumbo-ersatz, their refilled mugs of all-you-can-drink coffee, their faux-mint mouthwash with triple-pack toothpaste and extra toothbrushes thrown in for the value, their cars, their malls, their universities, even their monster television sets and spectacular big-screen epics, all, all of it, jumbo-ersatz. American women with breast implants, nose jobs, and perennially tanned figures—jumbo-ersatz. American women with smaller breasts, contact lenses, mouth spray, hair spray, nose spray, foot spray, scent spray, vaginal spray—no less ersatz than their oversized sisters…Their lank, freckled toddlers fed on sapless, bland-ersatz, white-ersatz bread and swaddled in ready-to-wear, over-the-counter, prefab, preshrunk, one-size-fits-all, poly-reinforced clothes couldn’t be more bland-ersatz than their big, tall, fast-food lumbering football giant daddies with outsized shoes, penis enlargers, and sculpted, washboard, eight-pack abs who personify the essence of all that was ever jumbo-synthetic on God’s ill-fated, jittery little planet.

The narrator is here paraphrasing an estranged friend, Kalaj, the Cab Driver of Cambridge; as he recollects this diatribe, and its emphasis on a single expression, an entire era of the narrator’s life—the period of his and Kalaj’s friendship—is opened up. A novel ensues.Kalaj: 35, a Tunisian expatriate who spends his downtime seducing women in campus coffee shops, scheming for a green card, and fulminating against white Americans. The narrator is a Middle East native as well—an Egyptian national, a non-practicing Jew, a 26-year-old Harvard grad student studying, in the summer 1977, for his oral examinations in classical literature. Their nostalgia for the Mediterranean, and a shared affinity for France, and French, is their relationship’s essential spark.The two met on an afternoon shortly before the fall term, in Café Algiers, “A tiny, cluttered, semi-underground café off Harvard Square that held no more than a dozen tiny, wobbly tables and that looked like a miniature Kasbah about to spill on the floor.” The narrator, who remains unnamed, heard Kalaj ranting at the next table; lonely and bored, he approached. From here the novel, like much of Aciman’s work, proceeds with all the momentum and variety of a minimalist opus by Philip Glass: the book is repetitive, keen on exploring the same tone over and over, then doubling back to explore the same tone yet again, with the same volume, the same feeling, the same cool-mindedness. The men go from bar to bar to café to bar, reminiscing on their home countries and seeking out women. Then it’s tomorrow, and then tomorrow again. Like Philip Glass’s best compositions, the novel is mesmerizing. Patterns form and re-form; the paragraphs become part of a book-long tessellation.We learn that, despite their geographical and linguistic bonds, the narrator and Kalaj (of course) take different approaches to life—Kalaj is a street hustler, the narrator a dainty academic. But each wants to be more like the other: the narrator lacks integrity (“How many masks was I wearing?” he asks at one point); his soul, unlike Kalaj’s, has no backbone. Kalaj’s personality, unlike the narrator’s, is too calcified—he is unable to adapt to new environments, is unaccepted by America, unacceptable to America.

I never raised my voice; he was the loudest man on Harvard Square…he stood for nothing, took no prisoners, lambasted everyone. I tolerated everyone without loving a single one. He wore his love on his sleeve; mine was buried layers deep…he could dump you and never think twice of it; I’d make up in no time, then spite you forever after…He was proud to know me, while, outside of our café society, I never wanted to be seen with him. He was a cabdriver, I was Ivy League.

And then somewhat inevitably it’s revealed that, despite their differences, there is something fundamentally similar about the men:

He was a stand-in for who I was, a primitive version of the me I’d lost track of and sloughed off living in America. My shadow self, my picture of Dorian Gray, my mad brother in the attic, my Mr. Hyde, my very, very rough draft. Me unmasked, unchained, unleashed, unfinished: me untrammeled, me in rags, me enraged. Me without books, without finish, without a green card.

This is the book: the definition and redefinition of their friendship. At various points the narrator discovers anew how alike he and Kalaj are, only to remind himself, in a list that spans a page or two, how little they resemble each other after all. A couple plots emerge—will Kalaj get his green card? will the narrator pass his comprehensive exams?—but these are secondary to, and less interesting than, the constant characterization of the friendship, secondary to the pull and sway of Aciman’s prose.Aciman’s use of amplification, his willingness to linger and play through refrains (“I…he…I…he…”; “My…my…my…”), has been his go-to technique throughout his career. A not-so-random, but still indicative, sampling of his other writings:From Call Me By Your Name: “‘Later!’ The word, the voice, the attitude. I’d never heard anyone use ‘later’ to say goodbye before…I can hear it still today. Later!”From Eight White Nights: “‘I am Clara.’ I am Clara, delivered in a flash…I am Clara. It barged in unannounced…‘I am Clara.’ It meant, I’m the Clara you’ll be seeing all year long.”From his essay, “Lavender”: “Smell lavender and I was sheltered, happy, beloved. Smell lavender and in came good thoughts—about life, about those I loved, about me. Smell lavender and, no matter how far from one another, we were all gathered in one warm, snug room.”Reading all of the author’s work in quick succession might induce a mental variant of carpal tunnel syndrome. But still, for all the repetition, Aciman is able to create suspense through his language—one never quite knows where a sentence will lead, at what thought or image one will arrive.Aciman’s tendency to chew his words over and over may have something to do with the idea that “what he loves is just remembering”; language is his primary access to the past. The turns-of-phrase that fascinate him and his narrators are triggers for the memories that fascinate them. Jumbo-ersatz conjures Kalaj; Later—“The word, the voice, the attitude”—brings back a former lover for the narrator of Call Me By Your Name. These linguistic twists are like unearthed shards of pottery that allow an archaeologist to imagine the shape and design of an entire, long-shattered urn.At the same time, a slight lack of understanding of language pervades Aciman’s work, perhaps most pointedly in Harvard Square: the narrator is a very smart individual (his primary conflict is that he might not be quite intelligent enough to receive his Ph.D. from Harvard) yet one who has, by all the evidence given, learned English primarily in classrooms and through reading classical literature. His English is a studied one, and he has little patience for vernacular. One senses that the narrator knows beyond doubt his grammar is immaculate and his vocabulary precise; moreover, he (and Kalaj) look down a bit on Americans for our messy colloquialisms. Concerning the phrase a woman uses to reject Kalaj’s advances, the narrator recounts:

He had never heard such ersatz-speak before, and he repeated the words to us as if he were mouthing a ritual incantation spoken by extraterrestrials: I think I’m going to take a pass…the sentence was suddenly exposed for what it was: bland treacle-speak that sounded as artificial and no more capable of passion and arousal than a linoleum tile or a Formica tabletop.

They aren’t merely confused, but scandalized by such sayings—another point of communion between the two. Put simply: the narrator and Kalaj, an academic and a taxi driver, are snobs. But it’s a genuine snobbery and is therefore forgivable. The snobbery gives the book its texture, gives the narrator his belief that it’s okay for him to reminisce on the smallest detail for pages and pages; more importantly, the snobbery belies the narrator’s notion that language should be handled carefully, shouldn’t be bastardized or frivolously used, for the reason that it is memory’s main ingredient--and memory is his chief form of sustenance. In any case, the narrator of Harvard Square is an observant, sensitive snob: one’s attention isn’t wasted on his reminiscing.____Max Ross‘s reviews have appeared in The Boston Globe, The Star Tribune, The Harvard Review, and The Rumpus. He is an editor at Open Letters Monthly.