Asymmetry
Awarded the Whiting Prize in 2017, Lisa Halliday’s debut novel tells a story in three parts. “Folly” chronicles the affair between Alice, a 25-year-old editorial assistant, and Ezra Blazer, an ailing Pulitzer Prize-winning writer. “Madness” follows Amar Jaafari, an Iraqi-American man detained at a holding room in Heathrow Airport. And a final coda details the unexpected relationship between Alice and Amar’s stories, in a reframing of the novel that questions the nature of narrative and storytelling, which 75 percent of our book club missed on our first read. Subtle! —Caroline Tsai
Warning, this post contains spoilers for the novel.
Caroline Tsai
There is “something about the metaphysical claustrophobia and bleak fate of being always one person,” Amar Jaafari reflects. A young economist detained in a holding room in Heathrow Airport in 2008, Amar has greater reason to chafe against this claustrophobia than anyone else. His detention is the product of a confluence of factors: his race (Iraqi-American), his itinerary (en route to Kurdistan, to visit his troubled brother), and his environment (confronted by British bureaucracy in a world that is still, in many ways, freshly post-9/11). Amar’s thought is a polemical one, resisting the determinacy of class, race, birthplace, and so on, yet also a reflection on the nature of fiction and authorship. After all, as we come to learn (spoilers incoming!), he is authored by not one, but two other invisible pens: that of Lisa Halliday, author of Asymmetry, and that of Alice, protagonist of Asymmetry’s first section, “Folly.”
The “bleak fate of being always one person” may very well be fiction’s raison d’être. Why else would anyone undertake the grand, narcissistic, bizarre, wonderful task of imagining themselves into another person’s subjectivity, if not to escape the confines of their own? Fiction is the escape hatch, the great imaginative exercise that makes life, at least for a time, worth living.
And yet, the metaphysical claustrophobia is the inescapable plight of the author. Halliday can’t escape it, and neither can Alice. Both are hemmed in by the undeniable truth that a novelist can only focus the mirror of fiction on her subject from a limited number of angles. In Halliday’s words—or rather in Amar’s, which are Alice’s, which are Halliday’s—“there’s no getting around the fact that she is always the one holding the mirror. And just because you can’t see yourself in a reflection doesn’t mean no one can.” It’s difficult to say whether a writer can fully know, much less inhabit, the subjectivity of another person, however similar or dissimilar to herself. Asymmetry is a kind of Russian nesting doll of biography and perspective: Amar’s story is littered with clues (from Alice’s life); so too is Alice’s (from Halliday’s). That Halliday and Alice imagine themselves into a Muslim man’s perspective is an imaginative leap whose political underpinnings I’m still not sure about.
I’m focusing, perhaps excessively, on this question of authorship, when Asymmetry has much else to offer. Halliday’s language is precise and resonant, and her ability to illuminate the quieter human moments between characters—Alice crying on the floor of Ezra’s apartment, Amar accompanying his friend to her abortion appointment—produces a story that is in turns funny and poignant, even apart from its grander philosophical queries about the nature of fiction. Finally, I’d be disingenuous to suggest that Asymmetry doesn’t also benefit from its roman à clef elements, as we learn the intricacies of an affair with a writer who is clearly an avatar for the late Philip Roth. Perhaps we can read the novel’s questions about writerly authority as, in part, a self-defense. Alice’s perspective is Halliday’s; it does not purport to be authoritative or to lay claim to Roth as an American literary figure. Alice’s account is just one woman’s perspective. But then again, what’s just about it?
Caroline Tew
What does it mean to like a book? For me, there isn’t just one reason a book gets a high or low rating. Sometimes I recognize that the reading experience was a complete delight but the book is what I like to call “no thoughts, head empty.” Other times, I can appreciate what a book is trying to do, but reading it was no fun at all (looking at you, modernism). In the case of Asymmetry, I enjoyed parts, was bored by others, understood the “project” of the novel, yet wasn’t impressed by it. So, lukewarm both on experience and execution.
I have to make two confessions. While I figured the first part was at least semi-autobiographical, I didn’t know the older author was a version of Philip Roth; I also missed the “twist” (a term I use lightly) even though I registered some aspect of it. Bonus third confession: I don’t know that I even really have an opinion on Philip Roth anyway.
Although the first section was from the perspective of a woman around my age working in the same field, I found it to be quite a drag. Mostly because I didn’t buy into the relationship. I think part of Halliday’s “project” was to make Mary Alice feel distant (so the so-called-twist could feel more impressive) but that just made me unable to understand why a 25-year-old would feel compelled to have sex with an ailing 70-year-old who approached her on the street!
The second section was more intriguing. In hind sight, however, I can’t help but roll my eyes when I think of it. Here comes the spoiler, but the “twist” is that section two is actually a novel written by Mary Alice from section one! Apparently that’s so cool because Mary Alice is a young white American woman and section two is from the perspective of an Iraqi-American man. But when I learned the “twist” I wasn’t impressed because I was already operating under the knowledge that Lisa Halliday, a young white American woman, wrote section two. So for the twist to be like, “look, a white lady wrote it!” is dumb because…we knew that. And then section three was incredibly boring and only relevant because the “twist” is revealed.
Look, I read mysteries with terrible twists all the time and it’s fine. But (and this is not the author’s fault) what got my dander up was how all the reviews lauded Halliday like she wrote the greatest twist of all time. “The reveal is both astonishing and retrospectively inevitable,” writes the New York Times. “In its subtle and sophisticated fable of literary ambition, and the forms it can take for a young woman writer, Asymmetry is a ‘masterpiece’ in the original sense of the word—a piece of work that an apprentice produces to show that she has mastered her trade,” in the Atlantic. I think, perhaps, we all need to settle down. It was fine.
Finally, I can’t discuss this novel without mentioning the prose. There were some really excellent lines; Halliday can really write. Caroline already used it (which is the price I pay for composing my blog post days later), but the quote about the mirror is superb. What I didn’t like? Entire paragraphs quoting the various books that Ezra had given Mary Alice to read. The book is under 300 pages! Also, write your own words! Anyway, this whole blog post sounds like a very curmudgeonly reader wrote it, but in actuality I gave it a solid 3.5 stars. I just like to complain.
Aline
It’s hard for me to articulate why I didn’t like Asymmetry beyond saying, I simply didn’t find it entertaining. It’s an interesting work in terms of the character consciousnesses and its commentary on writing, but it’s not really saying anything new about authorship. What I did appreciate about it was its character portraits. Through carefully selected, sparse dialogue we are immediately able to parse out personalities types and power in relationships.For example, in a matter of a conversation I knew exactly who and what Ezra was. From his tendency to spell out words to the music he introduced to Alice: I knew he was what this generation calls “a walking red flag,” if not an older creep. While the relationship dissected in Part I was fascinating, I was distracted by Alice’s lack of interiority. I just kept thinking—what is going on in her head? While I appreciated getting lots of that in Part II, I just didn’t find myself invested in the characters. Worst of all, I saw the plot twist of Alice writing “Madness” coming for a mile so I don’t have the mystery to propel me forward. I think that all the questions around authorship and authenticity were thoughtfully posed, but I had no trouble fathoming Alice writing Part II due to the identify of Lisa Halliday herself writing this book. I also didn’t know what she was ultimately trying to express. Is she a capable writer that can inhabit the mind of Amar as well as the mind of Alice? Sure. But honestly, I almost didn’t care about any of the questions posed, because I didn’t care about the book.
Looking ahead… Next month, we’ll be reading Iain Reid’s sci-fi novel and soon-to-be motion picture starring Paul Mescal and Saoirse Ronan, Foe.