Asymmetry, Lisa Halliday (2018)
Happily, Lisa Halliday’s debut novel Asymmetry has enjoyed some nice success. The NY Times favorably reviewed it several times and named it in “The New Vanguard” of the top 15 books of fiction by women in the 21st Century.
The book is structured asymmetrically, one might say, with two completely different stories. The stories are not interwoven and they are not related to each other, except that perhaps the difference in perspective and consequence of the stories is itself the point. A brief final third coda suggests such a purpose.
The storytelling is deceptively simple, masking an exploration of the subtle, complex layers of a writer’s craft, while also exploring a writer’s responsibilities. The language is unusually precise, and the spare dialogue serves a poignant ambivalence.
The first story is a third-party narrative of an affair, from 2002-2005, of Alice, a young woman in her early twenties, and a much older man, Ezra Blazer. Alice works as an editorial assistant for a NY publisher, and Ezra is a famous and wealthy novelist living in the Upper West Side. By all accounts, the character of the older man is based on Philip Roth, with whom Halliday, working as a young assistant editor for a NY publisher, had a relationship.
The affair is not torrid, though it is sexual. Ezra is apparently an old hand at affairs with younger women, and he picks up Alice sitting on a park bench with his well-worn line of “Are you game?” For Alice, it starts as a matter of curiosity, for her life is small and directionless, and she recognizes Ezra as the grand writer himself.
Ezra is initially cautious, avoiding a situation in which the young woman would assume a sense of belonging and entitlement in his apartment, but gradually they grow comfortable and she begins to accompany him on the town and out to his Long Island getaways. Alice is a woman of few words — just enough to passively assent to his suggestions regarding food, entertainment, sex, and help with his ailments and medications.
But, it is an affair of mutual benefit. Ezra understands that he can provide Alice real value, so he gradually introduces her to the world of books, classical music, and shopping. He nurtures her path to independence, giving her the money to buy at Searle a warm nylon coat with a hood of black fur, and even paying off her student loans to reduce her financial dependence on her job.
My take is that the story of the affair is purposely written as an exercise, demonstrating an evolution of a writer’s craft, starting with a simple self-conscious narrative to increasingly detailed dialogue and descriptions. In the actual story, we are told that Alice has begun to write, but we are never shown her writings. There are some cutaway, intermittent scenes between Alice and her neighbor – a lone older woman who gradually can no longer care for herself – that I interpret as Alice’s first attempt at writing a short story.
Alice occasionally tells Ezra of her stepfather in Boston, an alt-right anti-Semitic flamethrower. Ezra asks whether Alice writes about her father. No, Alice assumes a writer should write about important things like world affairs and war. Ezra says “world affairs can take care of themselves,” and that Alice should write about her father – “it’s a gift.”
Ultimately, it is a domestic affair, a passing of time for watching baseball on TV, for shopping for quality foods at boutique delis, and for help managing each other’s health and comfort.
The second story is a first-person narrative of a young man with dual citizenship of the U.S. and Iraq, born of immigrant Iraqi parents. He is informally detained in a London airport in 2009 while en route to Iraq to visit his older brother.
The airport detention scenes have numbing, almost comic, inane dialogue between unfailingly polite British airport security officers and our narrator, Amar Ala Jaafari. The security officers are nonplussed by dual-passport Amar’s story that he has arrived from the U.S. to spend a couple of nights with an old friend in London before departing for Turkey where he will drive into Iraq to visit his brother in Kurdistan during the height of war.
Amar is an accomplished American, though, having graduated from fine schools and obtained his PhD in economics. Amar is serene during this detention, even internally, while patiently answering the same questions over and over. Amar knows that the officers are waiting for some indication of irritability or insolence to justify his detention and their suspicions. The airport detention is mild and civilized, in spare empty rooms near the passport control gates, and Amar uses his time to reflect on his life and family.
Amar’s older brother never felt comfortable in America and idealized a grand future for Iraq. He had moved to Iraq before George W’s war, and became a doctor. Amar and his parents visit the brother several times during the war, and Halliday’s spare precise language to describe kidnappings, bombings and hospital triage is the more effective for its understatement.
The point, I believe, for the two seemingly unrelated stories is the juxtaposition, the asymmetry, of the two stories. The affair is a gilded world of abundance and indulgence, of time to waste, of affection without passion, of the aches and pains of old age, and the dullness of an editor’s office. But, is it of consequence? Perhaps Ezra is wrong about the place of world affairs – should a writer just permit world affairs to take care of themselves?
It is fair to say the stories are unrelated by character or scene, though their very differences are intended to show the choices available to a writer and all of us. I think I noticed a cameo appearance of our beautiful blond Alice, by then in her late twenties some three years after her affair with Ezra, sitting across the large detention room from Amar, with her legs impeccably crossed and her coat neatly folded on her lap, crying silently in her black fur hood. This is a woman in trouble. Perhaps she has been detained for some action of consequence.
The brief final third story, an epilogue really, is a 2011 interview with Ezra in London for the Desert Island Discs program. This is a literate radio interview that explores Ezra’s life and writing, while at the same time allowing Ezra to describe and choose his favorite music. At one point Ezra notes the heavy price that will be paid by the safe, self-centered modern way-of-life for failing to engage the warning signs of madness outside the affluent cocoon. Ezra then mentions a recent book by a “young friend of mine” that transcends her provenance by engaging in a wider perspective.
This is a book of nearly imperceptible layers. The prose is delicate, precise, lean, suggestive. One story is of writing, an exercise of writing craft utilizing the narrative of an affair, followed by a juxtaposition of writing for consequence utilizing the wartime story of Amar’s family.
Bob Fall 