Book Review: Lisa Halliday - Asymmetry

I wonder if some assistant editor greenlit the novel's title as a sarcastic commentary on its uneven quality; theoretically it alludes to some discussions of "imbalances of power/understanding" that the main characters have, or something like that, but I prefer my interpretation because I found the first and longest section to be formally well-written but almost completely unengaging emotionally. It's about Alice, a mid-twenties book editor who enters into a relationship with Ezra, a much older Famous Author who bears a striking resemblance to Philip Roth. In real life, author Lisa Halliday was romantically involved with the real Philip Roth, who in an unhappy coincidence died right around when Asymmetry was published. There's absolutely nothing inherently wrong with a roman à clef, but this section is as undramatic as it is long. Halliday is a zippy writer, so any individual sentence is well-crafted, but in plot terms there's not much interesting going on at any point, and since only the passage of time connects the scenes together it feels like a collection of rejected short stories that happen to feature the same characters: various geriatric medical issues, lots of baseball chat, Ezra keeps failing to win the Nobel Prize, they go on vacation together, Alice worries about her own creativity - who cares? There's not even any good sex scenes, as one would hope for from a story leveraging that link to fame, although Halliday does gift the world with the memorable simile "He came like a weak water bubbler."

My feelings changed dramatically in the (seemingly) completely unrelated second section, where Amar, an Iraqi-American economist, is detained at Heathrow while traveling back to Iraq because his brother has been kidnapped. This narrative takes place mainly while its protagonist is stuck in the maddening, pointless, absurd bureaucratic hell of airport security, so it's much more emotionally vivid and relatable if you've done any recent air travel, and even if you haven't, the asides where he explores his memories of his family and his now-distant relationship to his brother in the grim, sad, lethal landscape of post-Surge Iraq are quite moving. You really feel for Amar during every minute of his helpless agony as his life is put on hold by greater powers though individually each functionary is perfectly pleasant and helpful, and each recollection of his relationship with his disparate family members is full of personality. This section is well-paced and full of stakes and emotion, and perhaps it should have been the whole book, but just when you're in a rhythm and turning the pages, it flatly ends with another tragedy and a graceless jump-cut to the coda, a fictional Desert Island Discs episode with Ezra where he's since broken up with Alice but finally bagged that Nobel, unlike the real-life Roth. Neat, I guess. Kudos to Halliday for giving him good musical taste at least, and the way that Ezra puts the moves on the interviewer at the very end is pretty funny.

What to make of this? Amar's section doesn't appear to have anything to do with Alice's story, but if you pay really close attention there are some little hints that his story was actually Alice's creation, the work of her own that she had been vaguely worrying about to Ezra in the first section. So there is a very faint glimmer of Pale Fire-type conceptual playfulness between the narratives, but that actually almost made it worse for me: the whole point of Alice's story was to set up Amar's parade of tragedy, which just ends unsatisfyingly, and wasn't even "real" to begin with? I think the Amar section might have worked better as an Ezra product, since we got told a bunch how brilliant he was but never saw any of his theoretically Nobel-caliber writing, and as an Alice product it just gave me unpleasant thoughts about its likely genesis: what if Asymmetry is to the Lisa Halliday/Philip Roth relationship as Amar's story is to Alice/Ezra's - an attempt to prove creative independence to a more famous fling, and the reason the Alice/Ezra section is so boring is because it's basically a diary with the names changed? Alice and Ezra discuss the challenges of truly empathizing with someone; perhaps that's actually Halliday's issue, and the dull parts of this novel are like the infamous writer's block-induced "play about a struggling playwright"? In any case, hopefully readers with stronger connections to the New York literary scene fishbowl than I have will get more out of this novel.