tl;dr

A book of two halves, where the first half is significantly better than the second. You could say the quality is asymmetrical!

opening remarks

By now you should know that if a book has buzz, I’m going to read it.  Asymmetry by Lisa Halliday has had, what the experts would call, a fuck-tonne of buzz.  Halliday is a debut novelist, which makes it all the more enticing.  I don’t mind the cover either.

knee-jerk observations

It’s a good sign when you laugh out loud at a novel’s opening paragraph.  Having said that, Alice won’t be reading many, if any, literary works with that sort of attitude.

The thoughts and impressions that pop into your head when you’re kissing, for the first time, a very famous author:

Ezra, a famous author (whom Halliday acknowledges is ‘inspired’ by Philip Roth, not that it matters) is in a relationship with 25-year-old Alice who works as an editorial assistant in a publishing house (Halliday worked at a publishing house in her twenties and was intimate with Philip Roth, not that it matters).  Ezra has taken it upon himself to educate Alice in all things literary.  A bit of Mark Twain, some Camus, a soupçon of Henry Miller and, of course, the naughty love letters of James Joyce:

Throughout the first part of the novel we get excerpts from whatever Alice is reading at the time; generally a classic handed to her by Ezra.  The risk here is having Halliday’s prose compared to that of Mailer or Hannah Arendt.  Personally, I’m finding it as educational as Alice is.

Alice is staying with Ezra at his country home.  One night they head off to hear a recital from a young Japanese pianist, a bit of a progidy.  Overwhelmed by the performance, Alice reflects on what she hopes to achieve.  It’s a lovely bit of melancholy prose, a moment where Halliday stretches her writerly muscles:

The last line is a beauty:

We transition from the first section of the novel, ‘Folly’ to the second half of the book, ‘Madness.’  In doing so, we leave behind Alice and Ezra’s precariously placed relationship and turn to Amar, an Iraqi-American who, when we first meet him, is being interviewed… interrogated… by a customs officer as he tries to gain entry into the United Kingdom.  Splitting the novel into two distinct narratives, tonally different as well – we move from third to the first person – is reflective and, paradoxically, in conflict with the novel’s title.

We have the symmetry of the two narratives, but the asymmetry of subject matter and presentation. (It’s neat that the first chapter of section two has dialogue without the quote marks, harking back to Alice’s frustration with that type of literary novel).  I’m assuming that these two parts – Folly and Madness – will be linked in some way, whether obliquely, a sly reference to Ezra and his novels maybe, or something more direct and overt.

I’m finding Amar’s first-person account to be bland and generic compared to Alice’s story which had a certain innocence and charm: the ingenue and the cantankerous old author.  Amar’s story lacks personality or a sense of self. Take this excerpt –

– with its tedious attention to detail, trite metaphors and formal tone.  Is this an attempt on Halliday’s part to ape the style of Roth?  I have no idea as I’ve not read his work, another gaping hole in my literary library.  Still, I’m sure it’s not Halliday’s plan to bore the reader.  What does spice things up are the short chapters set between Amar’s recollection of his past where he continues to be questioned by UK immigration.

An oldie but a goodie, though the original version is a tad more graphic:

The Gist Of It

Asymmetry is two novellas stitched together by the theme of inequality (ergo the title).

In the first novella, that theme is expressed in the five-decade age difference between Alice and Ezra evidenced by the way Ezra shares (or imposes) his literary tastes on Alice, lavishes her with gifts and wads of money – to pay off her college debt and buy an air conditioner – and sets the tone of the relationship – she comes when he calls.  That makes it sound like Ezra is manipulative or abusive and, yes, the power dynamics are woefully uneven, but there’s a genuine connection between the two, one that comes less from sex and more from enjoying each other’s company (especially when the baseball is on).  What I found interesting is that for all the imbalances and asymmetries their devotion to each other is equally shared, even if it does get a little fraught in the end.  The first novella didn’t blow me away; it feels like it’s treading familiar ground (even if I can’t remember off the top of my head a story that deals with an older, charismatic (white) author having an affair with a much younger woman… remember I’ve not read Roth) but I found the ordinariness of their relationship, the respect they have for each other to be quite moving.  This is partly undermined by the coda where Ezra is interviewed on Desert Island Discs, and we get his confrontational, obstreperous and womanising public persona.  He’s not like that with Alice, and while it’s interesting to get more of Ezra’s background, I’m not sure what this coda adds to the book as a whole.

Regarding the second novella, I found Amar’s story to be far less arresting than Alice and Ezra’s.  Partly it’s the stodginess of the prose, and partly it’s the subject matter – the Iraq War and its consequences – that failed to engage me.  The asymmetry is again related to power, but this time it’s the injustice of a War fought for the wrong reasons by a dominant force.  There are other asymmetries such as the parallel between Amar and his brother, but mostly it comes back to Iraq and the civilians caught in the middle.  Halliday, via Amar, doesn’t have much to say that’s profound about the Iraq War other than the obvious concerning the impact on innocent life.  That’s not to say it’s not a relevant point, but I felt other novelists have done this better.  A recent example is Will Self’s Phone, a book I had significant problems with but which nails the stupidity and irrationality of the Iraq War through the eyes of its people.

The conceit of Asymmetry is an interesting one, and the opening novella is worth the admission price, but I’m not convinced that as a whole this is an entirely successful novel.