Novel posing as a memoir - or vice versa?: Harvard Square

Ha, Andre Aciman kind of fooled me - the highly eccentric and in fact annoying and nacissistic character, Kalaj, whom his unnamed narrator meets in the Cambridge coffee shop Cafe Algiers, as K. is engrossed in a diatribe attacking everything in America as "ersatz" isn't exactly meant to be a genius manque after all - in fact, the narrator is fully aware that K. is full of noise and bluster and that his attacks on all things American are a kind of mating ritual to attract girls - in other words, Kalaj himself is ersatz. The narrator has the sense to realize that K. fulminations are larded with cliches and, as he calls them, "superannuated" ideas. Very true - and I'm not sure his harangues would actually attract girls, maybe so, but more likely to drive people away and to embarrass others he encounters at the counters - bad for business. His real purpose in the novel (Harvard Square - is the title a pun?, is the narrator in fact the only "square" in Harvard circa 1976?) is to serve as the narrator's foil: both North African, both refugees from France, but one Jewish the other Arab, one over-educated the other under, one aspirational the other resigned, one naive the other jaded, one shy and lonely the other bombastic and a serial seducer (or so he says). Good start - though so far the novel is more about character than about action. I haven't read other fiction by Aciman (maybe a story here and there?), but his memoir, Out of Egypt,  was very beautiful and poignant, and the memoir form well suits his sensibility. HS is a novel that feels like a memoir, is in fact posing as a memoir: within the thin frame of the structure - father takes son on tour of Harvard and recalls his youth there - the novel veers directly into memoir mode, though of course we (or I) known nothing about the veracity, about the adherence, if any at all, to the facts of Aciman's life.