When I picked the copy of Lisa Halliday’s Asymmetry, I was amazed at the number of critical appraisals the book had received. Almost everyone mentioned on the cover was impressed with its ‘extraordinary’, ‘singularly inventive and unforgettable’ novel that takes on the ‘a stunt of transcendence.’ Obviously, there was also this anecdote running around the author: Halliday (Read: Alice) dated the American author Phillip Roth (Read: Ezra Blazer, who was forty-five years over her age).
Lisa Halliday’s Asymmetry is innovative in its techniques. There are three parts to the book, each connected with the other but also starkly disconnected from the other. In this sense, there is definitely a lack of symmetry in each story.
In the first part, titled: “Folly”, Alice, or Mary-Alice, an associate editor working at a literary agency in her mid-twenties, tumbles into a relationship with Ezra Blazer, who was a well-established and renowned author with multiple national book awards in his name. Ezra was kind with heart and weak with body. Alice was excited and still figuring out things in her life. This story is told in a third-person narrative.
But, importantly, the relationship between Ezra and Alice comes off as exemplary but simultaneously off-putting. However, every now and then, they have sex, go out to concerts, musicals, and the countryside where Ezra wrote, and, for the most part, sit in bed until he says the party is over. In between, Ezra watches baseball with her, pours her a bottle of champagne, gives her money to buy an air conditioner, pays off her school loans, suggests books she should read, and calls her to bring some stuff for him.
Just as one expects to know what happens to them, Halliday introduces us to another story of Amar Ala Jaafari, an Iraqi-American economist. This, entitled: “Madness”, forms the second part of the book. Amar is detained at the London airport, where he is due to meet with his friend Alistair for a couple of days before flying off to Iraq to meet his brother. But, it turns out, in the story, Amar is detained and questioned for hours by multiple immigration officers at multiple locations, only to be rejecting his visa to enter the United Kingdom. The story overlaps each time with his family and life narration, as does the encounter with immigration agents.
Turns out, Amar was born on a plane—and therefore, he was conferred American citizenship along with Iraqi citizenship. His father and mother moved to Bay Ridge in the United States. He later graduated from an Ivy League university. His brother becomes a doctor, much like his father. But, unlike the father, his brother wants to go back to Iraq and stay there. In between, there is his ex-girlfriend, who was into theatre—but wants to study for a doctorate in social sciences. In the story, there is sadness, there is melancholy, and a tinge of hope. But the story itself is told in a first-person narrative.
And finally, in the third part (or coda), there is an interview with the author Ezra Blazer, who has now won the Nobel Prize for Literature. He talks about music for the most part, which feels more exciting than his life, but in the end, he is flirting with the host. The third part’s narrative style is dialogic now.
When I was reading one of the reviews of this book, I encountered something I missed all through. And it was hard to miss. In the first part, Alice plays around with the idea of writing: perhaps writing about penetrating into the ‘consciousness of a Muslim man’ during the Iraq crisis. In the second part, Alice actually writes that story now. In the final section, Ezra’s interview highlights that his little friend has written a story of her own. In this sense, it is a story within a story. No wonder critics have come to appraise this work.
But, for a lay reader like me who reads books for the sheer joy of it, Lisa Halliday’s Asymmetry itself did not appeal as much. There was not much in the story to follow. There were also many instances that seemed routine, giving away all sorts of suspense in terms of what comes next. But, importantly, just as I enjoyed the first few pages of the novel, I also dreaded reading along with the same enthusiasm. It may be me. I may not be a careful reader, as I have witnessed in my own admission that I missed the connections between the three stories.
But, if you are a reader who enjoys fiction, it is definitely worth your time. It is written with a simple, lucid narrative about things we don’t see happen to us without us being there or can’t comprehend the things that happen around us. Lisa Halliday’s Asymmetry teaches us to be empathetic.