Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Asymmetry
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE:
CITY: Milan
STATE:
COUNTRY: Italy
NATIONALITY:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/jan/14/debut-novelists-2018-donkor-halliday-gowar-bracht-kitson-libby-page-aj-pearce
RESEARCHER NOTES:
| LC control no.: | n 2018001497 |
|---|---|
| LCCN Permalink: | https://lccn.loc.gov/n2018001497 |
| HEADING: | Halliday, Lisa |
| 000 | 00404cz a2200121n 450 |
| 001 | 10645539 |
| 005 | 20180109113822.0 |
| 008 | 180109n| azannaabn |n aaa |
| 010 | __ |a n 2018001497 |
| 040 | __ |a DLC |b eng |e rda |c DLC |
| 053 | _0 |a PS3608.A548363 |
| 100 | 1_ |a Halliday, Lisa |
| 670 | __ |a Asymmetry, 2018: |b CIP t.p. (Lisa Halliday) publisher’s summary (“A debut novel . . . from 2017 Whiting Award winner Lisa Halliday”) |
PERSONAL
Born in Medfield, MA; married.
EDUCATION:Attended Harvard University.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Wylie Literary Agency.
AWARDS:Whiting Award for Fiction, 2017, for Asymmetry.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Award-winning author Lisa Halliday grew up in Massachusetts and currently lives in Milan, Italy. She has been published in the Paris Review, and her debut novel, Asymmetry, received the 2017 Whiting Award for fiction. After attending Harvard University, she worked at the Wylie literary agency in both its New York and United Kingdom offices. Married to an Englishman who got a job as rights director with an Italian publisher, she moved to Milan.
Halliday published Asymmetry in 2018, a book divided into three novellas, seemingly unconnected until the final installment. The first story, “Folly,” is set on the cusp of the new millennium. Young publishing assistant Alice is married to the much older literary giant, Ezra Blazer. Despite their several decades age difference, they bond over literature, music, and baseball. An aspiring writer herself, Alice realizes that she can’t succeed until she pulls herself out of Ezra’s stifling shadow. In the second story, “Madness,” Amar is an Iraqi-American economist in 2008 trying to visit his brother in Kurdistan but is detained by immigration officers at the Heathrow Airport in London. In flashbacks, we learn about Amar’s happy life with his family but also the tragedy wrought by America’s war in Iraq. In the holding room in Heathrow, he contemplates the violence of other places and the immediacy of war.
“The juxtaposition of the two tales is further complicated—and illuminated—by the addition of a third and final section that brings them together,” declared a Kirkus Reviews contributor, who added that the two seemingly unrelated novellas form “one delicately joined whole.” The third story, taking place in 2011 after Ezra has won the Nobel Prize in Literature, is a transcript of Ezra on the BBC radio show “Desert Island Discs” in which people explain which songs they would want on a deserted island. The third story intersects the first two “resulting in a deep rumination on the relation of art to life and death,” observed Booklist critic Cortney Ophoff. Writing in the Washington Post, Karen Heller stated: “The moment Asymmetry reaches its perfect ending, it’s all the reader can do to return to the beginning in awe, to discover how Halliday upturned the story again and again.”
Halliday discussed the novel’s odd structure to a writer online at the Guardian. The writer reported: “She knows that some early readers have felt challenged by the novel’s structure, but also that there is a consensus that it is a challenge worth taking, which is reflected in its translation into half a dozen languages. Big history dances on tiptoe in the background, as do tricky questions about cultural appropriation and the freedom of writers to go anywhere their imagination leads them.” Guardian Online reviewer Justine Jordan commented: “Can any of us escape our own perspective? What are the risks, if we do not? What is art for, and how do we fit our lives around it? This is a debut asking a dizzying number of questions, many to thrilling effect. That it leaves the reader wondering is a mark of its success.”
On the theme of trying to write about another race or nationality’s experiences, Katy Waldman commented in the New Yorker that “‘Asymmetry’ poses questions about the limits of imagination and empathy—can we understand each other across lines of race, gender, nationality, and power? The fluttering way in which Halliday pursues her themes and preoccupations seems too idiosyncratic and beautiful to summarize.” Halliday presents “a meditation on who we might be when the most obvious components of our identity—age, religion, ethnicity, gender—have been stripped away,” Waldman added.
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, January 1, 2018, Cortney Ophoff, review of Asymmetry, p. 36.
Kirkus Reviews, December 15, 2007, review of Asymmetry.
Washington Post, February 23, 2018, Karen Heller, review of Asymmetry.
ONLINE
Guardian Online, https://www.theguardian.com/ (January 14, 2018), author interview; (February 28, 2018), Justine Jordan, review of Asymmetry.
New Yorker, https://www.newyorker.com/ (April 12, 2018), Katy Waldman, review of Asymmetry.
Lisa Halliday: ‘Meeting authors, I realised that all it required was persistence’
Lisa Halliday
‘Sometimes you have to just let your characters get on with it’ Photograph: Sophia Evans for the Observer
Lisa Halliday, 41, grew up in Massachusetts and now lives in Milan. Her work has appeared in the Paris Review and she received a 2017 Whiting award for fiction
Lisa Halliday tracks her debut novel back to her early 20s, when she landed a job with the Wylie literary agency in New York and found herself in the perfect position to listen in to the wisdom of writers. “They say many charming, clever, provocative things,” she explains. “I like the idea of combining someone like I was, living in New York, with someone who can teach her quite a bit and also talk to the idea of storytelling in general.”
In less flattering terms, she knows what it’s like to be [her protagonist]Alice, struggling to concentrate on an “impassable” book with “almost exclusively long paragraphs and no quotation marks whatsoever”. In the opening scene of Asymmetry, the twentysomething publishing assistant is doing just that when she is approached by an elderly man eating an ice-cream. He is Ezra, a Pulitzer prize-winning writer with a zipper-like scar from his stomach to his sternum – and so begins a May-December love affair that is also a masterclass on the craft of the novel.
It’s a bold scenario for a debut novelist with everything to prove, and Halliday is knowingly reckless in her invocation of the literary greats. In one early scene, Ezra advises Alice to remember what Chekhov said: “If there’s a gun hanging on the wall in the first chapter, in a later chapter it must go off.” To which Alice replies, “If there’s a defibrillator hanging on the wall in the first chapter, in a later chapter must it go off?”
The answers to this and many other questions are artfully concealed in a work that defies some key conventions of its chosen form yet remains triumphantly a novel. It is structured in three sections, with the story of Ezra and Alice’s affair followed by an apparently unconnected narrative involving a young Iraqi detained at Heathrow airport.
Born in Medfield, a small town 45 minutes outside Boston, to a mechanic father and a mother who started out as a seamstress and went on to found a pest control business, Halliday was a bookish child, who would sit on the steps of the local library waiting for it to open. She graduated from a local school to Harvard, an achievement she attributes to the good fortune of growing up in a town with an outstanding record in public education.
But, though she had always been praised for her writing, she lacked confidence, and says “it was meeting real writers and observing their work ethic and their concerns about their work that made me think I could do this – that all it requires is persistence and perhaps I should give it a go.”
She stayed with the Wylie agency for eight years, working in both their US and UK offices, and punctiliously recording in her journal the wit and wisdom of the authors she encountered along the way, before leaving to embark on own writing career. But only now that she is 41, and living in Milan with the distraction of a small baby, is she is publishing her first novel. What took her so long?
Partly, she admits, it was due to the demands of finding the money to pay the rent once the day job had gone. But subsequent freelance work – editing, proofreading, ghostwriting and translating – gave her a second apprenticeship and taught her about structure and unselfconscious storytelling.
Her early attempts at writing her own fiction attracted “encouraging rejections”, one of which described her work as “Babar written by EM Forster” – which she took to mean she had talent but had yet to find a story. It was such useful feedback that she has dropped it into the novel.
Gradually, her work began to find its mark, and she started to publish short stories and author interviews in the Paris Review. When her English husband landed a job as rights director with an Italian publisher, and the couple moved to Milan, the pieces of Asymmetry began to fall into place.
The “lightbulb moment” came when she had the idea of pairing the stories of two young people who happened to be living at the same historical moment, during the Iraq war. At first she tried to force their stories to intersect, but gradually she understood that to do so was a mark of immaturity as a writer. “Sometimes,” as Ezra says, “you just have to let your characters get on with it, which is to say coexist.”
She knows that some early readers have felt challenged by the novel’s structure, but also that there is a consensus that it is a challenge worth taking, which is reflected in its translation into half a dozen languages. Big history dances on tiptoe in the background, as do tricky questions about cultural appropriation and the freedom of writers to go anywhere their imagination leads them.
The aim, she says, is to achieve what Italo Calvino described as leggerezza, and during the interview, we ponder what this “lightness” means. An hour later she emails a quote: “My working method has more often than not involved the subtraction of weight,” wrote the Italian master in his 1985 lecture collection Six Memos for the New Millennium. “Above all I have tried to remove weight from the structure of stories and from language…” Yet again Halliday invites comparison – not arrogantly but with a confidence that seems both innocent and entirely justified. CA
• Asymmetry by Lisa Halliday is published by Granta Books, 1 March
Asymmetry
Cortney Ophoff
Booklist.
114.9-10 (Jan. 1, 2018): p36. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2018 American Library Association http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text:
* Asymmetry.
By Lisa Halliday.
Feb. 2018.288p. Simon & Schuster, $26 (9781501166761).
Halliday's beautiful debut novel is written in three distinct parts. In the first, Alice, a young editor in New York, embarks on a relationship with Ezra, a much older, multi-Pulitzer Prizewinning novelist. Though they are decades apart, the two find commonality in their love of literature, music, and baseball, and their relationship steadily grows stronger and more loving as the old millennium gives way to the new. In the novel's sec ond part, readers meet Amar, an Iraqi American who is being detained at Heathrow Airport en route to his brother in Kurdistan. Amar's story is told mosdy in flashbacks, illuminating both the joys of his family and also the tragedies of a war-torn country and its people. Amar's and Alice's stories are, at first glance, completely unrelated and can easily be enjoyed as such. Halliday moves from sparse, purposeful prose in the first to an almost brooding narration in the second, and only the lightest touches seem to link them, until one final moment. The third and final section is an interview with Ezra, and it is here that Halliday deftly and subtly intersects the two disparate stories, resulting in a deep rumination on the relation of art to life and death.--Cortney Ophoff
1 of 5 7/12/18, 9:59 PM
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MA...
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Ophoff, Cortney. "Asymmetry." Booklist, 1 Jan. 2018, p. 36. Book Review Index Plus,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A525185566/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=8c55da33. Accessed 12 July 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A525185566
2 of 5 7/12/18, 9:59 PM
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MA...
Halliday, Lisa: ASYMMETRY
Kirkus Reviews.
(Dec. 15, 2017): From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Halliday, Lisa ASYMMETRY Simon & Schuster (Adult Fiction) $26.00 2, 6 ISBN: 978-1-5011-6676-1
Two seemingly unrelated novellas form one delicately joined whole in this observant debut.
Halliday writes first, in Folly, of Alice, an editor in New York during the second Bush presidency, and her relationship with Ezra, a well-known and much older author. Alice struggles to establish her own identity at a time when Ezra's health concerns focus his attention on mortality. Through their occupations and their relationship, the lovers examine the nature of story. "Who knows if it's any good," Ezra says of his manuscript at one point. "It's a funny business, this. Making things up. Describing things." Alice's roles as both a literary gatekeeper and a much younger companion are an important, related dichotomy. Art is omnipresent; music and baseball, too, become the rhythm that runs beneath the melody of the couple's interaction. Alice wants to write about herself, but she "doesn't seem important enough." The lovers' age difference adds gravity to their relationship and the stories they each tell. The second part of the book, Madness, initially appears to be wholly unrelated to the first: Amar, an Iraqi-American economist, is detained at Heathrow on his way to visit his brother in Kurdistan in 2008. Halliday hints at her strategy, though: "Death is the dark backing a mirror needs if we are to see anything," says Amar as he's detained, quoting Bellow. Amar's story is darker, filled with grief, and alternates between flashbacks and the present day. Though nothing is obvious about the connection of Amar's story to Alice's, the author gently highlights notes from the first story, and the juxtaposition of the two tales is further complicated-- and illuminated--by the addition of a third and final section that brings them together.
A singularly conceived graft of one narrative upon another; what grows out of these conjoined stories is a beautiful reflection of life and art.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Halliday, Lisa: ASYMMETRY." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Dec. 2017. Book Review Index Plus,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A518491522/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=0f235929. Accessed 12 July 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A518491522
3 of 5 7/12/18, 9:59 PM
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MA...
Book World: A former lover of Philip
Roth has published a novel about a
writer like Philip Roth
Karen Heller
The Washington Post.
(Feb. 23, 2018): News: From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2018 The Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/
Full Text:
Byline: Karen Heller Asymmetry
By Lisa Halliday
Simon & Schuster. 288 pp. $26 ---
Initially, Lisa Halliday's debut novel, "Asymmetry," appears to be a roman a clef. A young publishing assistant named Alice embarks on a love affair with the American literary lion, Ezra Blazer, who sounds and behaves very much like Philip Roth.
In fact, any identification with Roth, with whom Halliday once shared a romance, seems there for the reader's delight and plucking. An incorrigible flirt, with no progeny and every literary honor but the Nobel (a recurring joke), Ezra has a weakness for almost everything older - Yiddish humor, vintage music, forgotten movies - except companions. Women he prefers absurdly young.
Ezra is Alice's teacher, her patron, and in danger of being her everything if she doesn't stake a claim. Alice muses, "As soon as you are born the sand starts falling and only by demanding to be remembered do you stand a chance of it being upturned again and again."
In the midst of becoming a writer, wise Alice realizes that she cannot bloom as an artist as long as she is enveloped by Ezra. "Ninety-seven years they'd lived between them, and the longer it went on the more she confused his for her own."
Halliday's coruscating work takes you down roads you hadn't planned on taking. Alice's name is no accident; Lewis Carroll's heroine is invoked several times. Even the book's structure is initially bewildering. "Asymmetry" delivers two seemingly disconnected novellas, followed by a brief third coda.
4 of 5 7/12/18, 9:59 PM
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MA...
And that is the magic of this exquisite, impressive book: the way it plays with influence and assumption. As Ezra notes, "Our memories are no more reliable than our imaginations, after all. But I'm the first to admit it can be irresistible, contemplating what's 'real' versus 'imagined' in a novel."
After the first novella, titled "Folly," the book takes a hard left into "Madness." Amar is on his way to visit his brother in Iraq, in possession of two passports and few wiles about airport security. The result is a prolonged detention in a Heathrow holding room, a contemporary purgatory.
Amar's story, the less familiar, is relayed in the first person, while Alice's story, which seems deeply rooted in Halliday's own biography, is told in the third. These two smart, perceptive characters are the same age, well-educated, yet unlikely to collide.
A girlfriend tells Amar, "Once we know the end of an unfortunate story, it's tempting to ask why its protagonist did not do better to swerve his fate." Deprived temporarily of his freedom, Amar contemplates what he knows and has failed to learn, the violence of other places, the constant of war, the absurdity of his situation. He considers the writing of Stephen Crane: "It perhaps might be said - if anyone dared - that the most worthless literature of the world has been that which has been written by men of one nation concerning the men of another." Which is precisely what Halliday is doing.
But, Amar asks, "wasn't it also Crane who said that an artist is nothing but a powerful memory that can move itself at will through experiences sideways?" This passage also moves sideways in the novel, Ezra having typed it in "Folly" for Alice to discover.
"Asymmetry" concludes with the section entitled"Ezra Blazer's Desert Island Discs," based on the BBC radio program that asks guests to name the songs they would want on a deserted island. Halliday has blessed Ezra with unexpected events in his late age, gifts that deviate from Roth's biography. Ezra's comic imperative to seduce, however, remains a constant. In his wide-ranging interview on the radio show, he becomes the key to understanding the novel's wonders. For us, the ride is in surrendering to falling down rabbit holes to unknown places. The moment "Asymmetry" reaches its perfect ending, it's all the reader can do to return to the beginning in awe, to discover how Halliday upturned the story again and again.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Heller, Karen. "Book World: A former lover of Philip Roth has published a novel about a writer
like Philip Roth." Washington Post, 23 Feb. 2018. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A528637980/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=29662895. Accessed 12 July 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A528637980
5 of 5 7/12/18, 9:59 PM
Asymmetry by Lisa Halliday review – a dizzying debut
This thrilling novel about a relationship between an ageing writer and a young woman explores the uses of creativity
Justine Jordan
Justine Jordan
Wed 28 Feb 2018 02.30 EST
Last modified on Fri 2 Mar 2018 19.10 EST
Lisa Halliday … deliciously fertile ambiguities.
Lisa Halliday … deliciously fertile ambiguities. Photograph: Sophia Evans for the Observer
“So. Miss Alice. Are you game?” The question is posed by an eminent novelist of about 70, who has sat on a Manhattan park bench and struck up conversation with a young woman reading a book. It sounds like the beginning of another #MeToo story, and Lisa Halliday’s striking debut is certainly – as the title implies – a sharp examination of the unequal power dynamic between men and women, innocence and experience, fame and aspiration. Through its fractured structure and daring incompleteness, it also explores the unreliability of memory, the accidents of history and the exercise and understanding of creativity. Most of all, it wonders whether we can ever “penetrate the looking-glass” of our own personality to imagine another consciousness – a question as relevant to human relationships as it is to novel writing.
Sign up for Bookmarks: discover new books our weekly email
Read more
Twentysomething Alice works in publishing, so is instantly in awe of this old man offering her chocolate with a trembling hand. He is world-famous writer Ezra Blazer, a dead ringer for Philip Roth, with whom Halliday had a relationship in her 20s. The Lewis Carroll references are intentional: this Alice is also struggling to progress through a confusing, surreal world. She finds herself jumping down a rabbit hole – or, rather, into a lift up to Ezra’s apartment, worrying “more than a little about what was going to happen next” – and embarking on a tricky, tender affair in which the rules are inevitably set by him. He summons her by phone, appearing always as “CALLER ID BLOCKED”, then sings “The party’s over …” when he wants her to leave. He gives her presents that range from the sweets of his youth to rolls of hundred-dollar bills via bagloads of improving books (“It’s Ca-MOO, sweetheart. He’s French”). She calls him cradlerobber; he calls her graverobber. The medical complications are hair-raising.
Throughout all this, though Alice is the narrative focus, the reader has very little insight into her feelings. We are left to assume, from her scrutiny and destruction of Polaroids Ezra takes of her, the standard amount of self-loathing typical of a young woman, her helpless immaturity. This scrupulously withholding tone enables some deliciously fertile ambiguities. Early on, Ezra gives her a lesson to countermand the endless female impulse to apologise: “Darling, don’t continually say ‘I’m sorry’. Next time you feel like saying ‘I’m sorry’, instead say ‘Fuck you’.” When they later clash over the predictable difficulties of their asymmetric relationship, her “Fuck you” has a delicately devastating irony.
Meet the new faces of fiction for 2018
Read more
The novel is mostly set at the opening of the century, around the US invasion of Iraq. Its first section ticks off the years through the Nobel prizes Ezra misses out on: “Blazer! You were robbed!” yells a man in the street when Elfriede Jelinek wins in 2004. It tacks close to reality, containing not only Nobel citations but passages from the classic authors Ezra urges on Alice: Camus, Henry Miller, Primo Levi. There’s another asymmetry here, between the canon and the debutante, between histories of Auschwitz and a Manhattan comedy of manners. Slabs of text from medicine packets and abortion clinic leaflets add to a sense of the overwhelming variousness of historical and literary experience – a pack of cards threatening to bury would-be writer Alice, who is “starting to consider really rather seriously whether a former choirgirl from Massachusetts might be capable of conjuring the consciousness of a Muslim man”. Then there’s Ezra looming in the foreground, and the anxiety of influence: “And, hadn’t he already said everything she wanted to say?”
The second and third sections do not exactly answer this question, but consider it from different angles. In the second Amar, an Iraqi American detained at border control in London, looks back on his life. The final section is a ridiculously convincing transcript of a Desert Island Discs interview with Ezra in 2011, by which time he has at last bagged a Nobel (Halliday borrows Mario Vargas Llosa’s, awarded in 2010). That Halliday can write part of her book in the voice of Kirsty Young, and pull it off, is one of the many surprises here.
Can we escape our own perspective? If not, what are the risks? What is art for, and how do we fit our lives around it?
Amar’s section is more complicated – and indeed, it’s meant to complicate things. Where we read between the lines of Ezra and Alice’s zippy dialogue to intuit the shifting tides of emotion between them, Amar is a more traditionally forthcoming narrator. He wants to convey the experience of growing up in the US in an immigrant family, of trips to Baghdad, first loves and first jobs. He translates Arabic phrases for us and uses his medical training to muse on genetics; he wrestles sincerely with questions of time, memory and identity, drawing on a wide literary hinterland that suggests he’s read all those books Ezra bought for Alice, and more. He notes that we are all different people at different times and in different places – youth and adulthood, America and Iraq, one’s diary and one’s head – but he cannot escape the accident of his birth, trapping him in a story of violence and war.
Can any of us escape our own perspective? What are the risks, if we do not? What is art for, and how do we fit our lives around it? This is a debut asking a dizzying number of questions, many to thrilling effect. That it leaves the reader wondering is a mark of its success.
• Asymmetry is published by Granta. To order a copy for £12.74 (RRP £14.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99..
Why “Asymmetry” Has Become a Literary Phenomenon
By Katy Waldman
April 12, 2018
Lisa Halliday’s début novel has a voyeuristic charge, but its biggest thrills are found in its formal and imaginative ambitions.
Photograph by Calogero Russo / NYT / Redux
The past couple of years have been relatively quiet ones for fiction, punctuated not by lightning strikes but by gentle, misty showers of high-quality work. Jesmyn Ward, George Saunders, Mohsin Hamid, and Jennifer Egan all brought honor to their profession with novels that tilted lyrical, introspective, melancholy—or else traditional, more fun to read than to talk about. The twenty-six-year-old Sally Rooney arrived with “Conversations with Friends,” a searching comedy of art and manners set in Dublin; Jenny Zhang had the plangent, profane “Sour Heart,” published by the Lenny imprint. Carmen Maria Machado, with the gorgeously nervy and kinky short stories in her collection “Her Body and Other Parties,” perhaps came closest to inspiring a roar.
It is probably Trump’s fault that so few recent works of fiction have become events, in the way that “A Little Life,” by Hanya Yanagihara, did in 2015, or “The Underground Railroad,” by Colson Whitehead, did a year later (or “Cat Person,” by Kristen Roupenian, did in December). By event I mean: lovingly curated quotations saturate Instagram; every book club you know is reading it (your mother’s, your neighbor’s); breathless reviews crop up in publications better known for their economics coverage; magnetic young people with interesting piercings peruse it in coffee shops; friends text you to ask what page you’re on; etc. What closes the distance between a well-received novel and a literary phenomenon? The spaceship must be ingeniously made, of course; but then mysterious hyperdrives—luck, fate, the fixations of “the moment,” whether or not the book was published before 2016—would appear to kick in.
“Asymmetry,” the début novel by Lisa Halliday, the recipient of the 2017 Whiting Award, started breaking through the literary event horizon in February. The book unfolds in rounded binary form, major and then minor, its first movement (“Folly”) inhabiting a wistful, comedic key and its second (“Madness”) suddenly airier with sorrow. (There’s also a slim, revelatory coda.) Halliday begins with Alice, a books editor in her mid-twenties who tumbles into a relationship with a famous writer forty-five years her senior. Ezra Blazer, modelled after Philip Roth (whom the author dated once upon a time, while working at the Wylie agency), is caustic, controlling, and generous. He showers Alice, with her vague and private dreams of writing fiction, in Camus and Arendt, Joyce and Genet—and also in fur-lined Searle coats, ice-cream cones, and money with which to pay off her student loans. Ezra’s mind is brilliant but his body is frail. Alice describes the sex as “like playing Operation—as if his nose would flash and his circuitry buzz if she failed to extract his Funny Bone cleanly.” Meanwhile, the unformed protagonist barely indents the page. Like one of Rachel Cusk’s cool-voiced narrators, Alice withholds most of her thoughts, only feinting at “the incessant kaleidoscope within” through lines of wry or tender dialogue, or else with riotous descriptions that erupt as if by accident: “Light shimmered in the trees, whose leaves, when the wind ran through them, sighed like the gods after a long and boozy lunch.”
The novel surely owes some of its event-ness to the voyeuristic thrill of reading about watching baseball in bed next to Philip Roth; ordering Walnettos from the Vermont Country Store account belonging to Philip Roth; having geriatric, Hasbro-inflected sex with Philip Roth. (“He came like a weak water bubbler.”) But it is also, actually, spellbinding: “so strange and startlingly smart,” Alice Gregory wrote, in the Times, “that its mere existence seems like commentary on the state of fiction.” Much of this strangeness and smartness comes down to structure. After Alice, Halliday abruptly introduces Amar Ala Jaafari, an Iraqi-American economist and the first-person narrator of “Madness,” who, unlike the reticent young woman, roils with memories and emotions. He’s gone to London to meet a journalist friend; from there, he plans to fly to Kurdistan in search of his brother, Sami, who has disappeared. The year is 2008, and the war on terrorism is well under way. Amar, a dual citizen of the United States and Iraq, gets detained at Heathrow for a Kafkaesque round of questioning. Between interrogations, he considers his childhood in Bay Ridge, his Ivy League education, his former girlfriend; presented out of order, the scenes glow with specific thought and perception, a testament to Amar’s interior life (while Alice often made her own scenes feel uninhabited). Adding to the lyrical force of this section is the urgency of new asymmetries: not, any longer, between ambition and achievement, or a younger woman and an older man, but between the West and the Middle East, the state and the individual.
“Asymmetry” poses questions about the limits of imagination and empathy—can we understand each other across lines of race, gender, nationality, and power? The fluttering way in which Halliday pursues her themes and preoccupations seems too idiosyncratic and beautiful to summarize, although there are serious, “Gone Girl”–grade spoilers that a reviewer must worry about revealing. (This piece touches on several of them, so stop reading here if you must.) The book richly considers the diffusions of life into art, of my consciousness into yours. It is also a musical document, with characters that play the piano or devote a great deal of energy to considering which CDs they’d want to bring with them to a desert island. Like music, “Asymmetry” possesses the mysterious quality of a created thing moving through time, expressing its own patterns, its meaning subsumed in the shifting symmetries of its form. Perhaps I have mischaracterized the book as a “literary event”; it might just be the song of the summer.
It certainly speaks to present-day conversations, though obliquely. The relationship between Ezra and Alice—the maestro and the talented novice—is both clarified and occluded by the concerns that #MeToo has forced into the spotlight. He asks too much. She trusts herself too little. Take or leave a triggered defibrillator, the reader can guess how their story will end: with the wised-up ingenue extricating herself from the demands and condescension of the mentor/monster in order to stake her claim on the world. Yet the sadness of “Folly” seems as much a matter of timing as it is of skewed power dynamics. One wonders what might have happened had the lovers met in some alternate universe, with he younger or she older, or he a woman, or she a man. How would this narrative have run differently?
That question flirts with tautology, but “Madness” and the novel’s coda expose “Asymmetry” as a meditation on who we might be when the most obvious components of our identity—age, religion, ethnicity, gender—have been stripped away. The coda, which confirms with the lightest of touches that Amar sprang from Alice’s head, suggests that our inner lives hold more nuance than can be contained in the boxes we check on a census form. This nod to the promise of artistic universality could account for some of the book’s popularity: in granting the white woman (qualified) permission to imagine the Muslim postdoc, Halliday challenges the “stay in your lane” vigilance now dominating young-adult fiction in particular. Ironically (or maybe not, given his provenance), it is Amar who struggles to press his own experience onto paper. He finds himself unable to write about the devastation in Iraq: for him, the looking glass that functions throughout the novel as a metaphor for the creative process shows only chaos. He recalls watching the flow of traffic through the window of a California diner, so thrown at the time by news about his brother that the scene slid sideways into reverie. “Approaching their own reflections,” Amar remembers, the vehicles “appeared to drive into themselves, to glide eastward and westward at once—their hoods and wheels and windshields to disappear into antimatter, the flag to devour itself.”
A novelist might wish to travel through the looking glass into another’s consciousness, but what if she gets swallowed by her own reflection? Alice (and her creator, who seeds “Folly” with all of the trademarks of a roman à clef) slips her skin, but not without subjecting that freedom to a rigorous stress test. “Just because you can’t see yourself in a reflection doesn’t mean no one can,” Amar cautions. “Asymmetry” stops short of arguing that novelists can leave themselves entirely behind; no person has the power to turn a mirror into a rabbit hole. The book does, however, evoke how our lives can sometimes blur with the lives of others, how a stranger’s features can occasionally ripple up the glass like an arpeggio.
Video From The New Yorker
Lies and Truth in the Era of Trump
Toward the end of “Madness,” Amar receives a pointless medical exam at Heathrow. “It was … a peculiar experience,” he says, “this undergoing a checkup when I didn’t need one, when I hadn’t the mildest complaint other than the agony of my helplessness.” The narrator’s clean bill of health doesn’t solve any of his problems; it’s just another piece of bureaucratic absurdity. Yet there’s something poignant about this unnecessary assertion of a made-up person’s physical well-being, especially after so many pages of Ezra wrestling with his failing frame: it hints that we can fulfill some of our own needs by living more completely in each other. As the exam concludes, Amar feels “unburdened somehow, lighter and even a little effervescent—as though, in the very process of having its robustness confirmed, I’d shed my body and left it on the floor.”
Katy Waldman is a staff writer at The New Yorker.Read more »
Book Reviews
'Asymmetry' Is A Guide To Being Bigger Than Yourself
February 15, 20187:00 AM ET
Annalisa Quinn
Asymmetry
Asymmetry
by Lisa Halliday
Hardcover, 288 pages
purchase
At first, Asymmetry seems like a story we've heard before: Young, pretty would-be writer Alice launches an affair with Ezra, a literary celebrity several decades her senior. He gets a stent, she gets an abortion, he teaches her to pronounce Camus ("It's CA-MOO, sweetheart"), she picks up his meds, he calls her a "good girl," she calls him "cradle robber."
For the first few chapters, it seemed too tired and too insular a story to hear again all for the meagre reward of watching a lightly disguised Philip Roth ejaculate "like a weak water bubbler."
But as Asymmetry progresses, its quietly subversive undercurrents grow stronger and the story resolves into an interesting meditation on creativity, empathy, and the anxiety of influence. In the most obvious of the book's many asymmetries, Alice struggles to escape from Ezra's certainty, his awards, his taste in books, his boulder-sized talent, always dragging along behind them.
How could she be a writer? "After all, hadn't he already said everything she wanted to say"? His success seemed to preclude the possibility of hers — making it seem like her romantic and creative liberation must go hand in hand: "[A]s she lay with her bra around her waist and her arms around his head she marvelled at how his brain was right there, under her chin, and so easily contained by the narrow space between her elbows. It began as a playful thought, but suddenly she distrusted herself to resist crushing that head, turning off that brain."
In 'Heart Berries,' An Indigenous Woman's Chaotic Coming-Of-Age
Author Interviews
In 'Heart Berries,' An Indigenous Woman's Chaotic Coming-Of-Age
A Debut Author Imagines Herself Into Other Lives In 'Asymmetry'
Book News & Features
A Debut Author Imagines Herself Into Other Lives In 'Asymmetry'
Among Ezra's many literary injunctions is one against sentimentalizing strangers. Focus on those close to you, he advises, when Alice is overanalyzing the homeless man wearing too many coats, or a struggling halal hot dog vendor. As a result, Alice starts to "consider really rather seriously whether a former choirgirl from Massachusetts might be capable of conjuring the consciousness of a Muslim man ..."
Years pass, measured in Nobel prize announcements (Ezra, like Roth, always misses out), and then Asymmetry suddenly molts its feathers, as if a pigeon you had been idly watching from a park bench turned into a beautiful, startling flamingo in the middle of Central Park. A new book begins, one about a Muslim man, though not a hot dog vendor.
Amar is an economist and the American son of Iraqi Kurdish immigrants. He is detained at Heathrow Airport on his way to Iraq, where his brother has disappeared. From the holding area in Terminal Five, he remembers his brother: "Who disappears? Not a man with a belly laugh. Not a man whose hands, when he plays a piano, make an octave look like an inch. The last time I saw my brother, leaning gigantically back in his plastic garden chair, he grinned and brushed unseen particles from his biceps, then lifted his face to scan the clouds fleeting west like an exodus across the Kurdish sky."
'Asymmetry' suddenly molts its feathers, as if a pigeon you had been idly watching from a park bench turned into a beautiful, startling flamingo in the middle of Central Park.
Amar's story, in contrast to the meek stylishness of Alice's, is bold, mournful, and unabashed, told in a graceful, forceful first person. Though Amar's section could stand on its own (Alice's might not), the juxtaposition of these two stories is wonderfully suggestive: To what extent can we inhabit each other? What can we know about each other? How do we think about the suffering of others, and where do we put the blame? Can Alice inhabit Kurdistan, and Amar inhabit Alice? Asymmetry is a novel not only about the creation of that novel, but about the borders of empathy.
The book's final chapter is an interview with Ezra, some years later, which – and this might be a spoiler — confirms our suspicion that the previous section was Alice's creative jailbreak. As Amar thinks, "We all disappear down the rabbit hole now and again ... Sometimes you just want someone else to take over for a little while, to rein in freedom that has become a little too free. Too lonely, too lacking in structure, too exhaustingly autonomous. Sometimes we jump into the hold, sometimes we allow ourselves to be pulled in, sometimes, not entirely inadvertently, we trip." Amar is talking about God, but what he says is true of any power asymmetry. That Amar is so much more alive than Alice is her triumph.
"Everyone's hourglass was running down," Alice thinks. "As soon as you are born the sand starts falling and only by demanding to be remembered do you stand a chance of it being upturned again and again." By herself, Alice is forgettable, but in Amar, she demands to be remembered. Asymmetry is a guidebook to being bigger than ourselves.
Asymmetry: A Mentorship Tale, With Surprises
Lisa Halliday’s new book inventively tackles a familiar storyline, encouraging real-world identifications in order to subvert them.
Adam Kirsch
Feb 18, 2018
The Upper West Side of New York
Jaguar Land Rover / Getty
Even if you had never heard a word about Asymmetry or its author, Lisa Halliday, before you started reading the book, it wouldn’t take long to realize that the figure at the center of the story is a version of Philip Roth. After all, Halliday’s Ezra Blazer is an elderly, very famous writer, Jewish, living on the Upper West Side, perpetually passed over for the Nobel Prize. Halliday changes a few details—Blazer is from Pittsburgh, while Roth always writes about his boyhood in Newark—but these amount to drawing a mustache on a familiar portrait: a gesture at concealment, rather than an actual effort.
In fact, Halliday has not tried to disguise the Rothian origins of the character. In a profile in The New York Times, she acknowledged that the story of Asymmetry—one of the stories, anyway—is loosely based on her own romantic relationship with Roth. Halliday was a young woman working in publishing in the early 2000s when she met Roth, just like her character Alice, an editorial assistant at “Gryphon,” when she meets Blazer. By making this information public, an official part of the novel’s “origin story,” Halliday is not simply fanning the flames of readerly curiosity. Rather, she is opening a door into the labyrinth that she has designed in Asymmetry, a book whose unusual structure is part of its fascination. Like Roth himself, who inveterately mixes up literature and life, Halliday encourages real-world identifications so that she can play with them and subvert them.
More Stories
Stop Making Film Adaptations of Philip Roth Novels
Adam Chandler
Emmy Nominations 2018: Netflix Takes Over
Sophie Gilbert
Elsie Fisher in 'Eighth Grade'
Eighth Grade Is a Mesmerizing, Heartfelt Portrait of Teenhood
David Sims
Pusha T
The Gospel According to Pusha T
Josie Duffy Rice
Asymmetry is two seemingly unrelated novels in one. In its first section, “Folly,” it tells the story of Alice’s relationship with Ezra, as it plays out in New York in the years after 9/11. Then, in its second section, “Madness,” it becomes a monologue by Amar Jaafari, an Iraqi-American who is being detained by immigration officers at Heathrow Airport. The challenge to the reader—helped along by a subtle, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it clue in the novel’s brief coda—is to figure out how, and still more why, these two tales belong together, despite their very obvious “asymmetry.”
By announcing that the Alice section is based on her own experience, Halliday cannily leads the reader to begin the novel with certain expectations. It becomes difficult not to see it as a disguised memoir—a familiar genre for a debut novelist, and one that critics tend to approach with a measure of condescension. And Alice is particularly easy to underestimate because of the way Halliday writes about her. Though there is no doubt that she is the protagonist of “Folly,” and that we are seeing Blazer through her eyes—his frailty, his sexuality, his egotism, his demands—Halliday carefully rations the reader’s access to Alice’s interiority. We seldom hear her actual thoughts about what is happening in her life; rather, Halliday prefers to drop indirect clues. On one of their first meetings, for instance, Alice writes down her phone number for Ezra on the bookmark she has been using: “You’ve lost your place,” he says, to which she replies, “That’s okay.” The foreshadowing is apparent: Alice will indeed lose her place—in life, in literature—by ceding it to Blazer. That she meekly accepts the loss is a sign of how much she will have to change in order to repair it.
It is only because Alice remains so quiet that the story in “Folly” can be taken, as it has by some critics, as a kind of romantic comedy. Comedy there is, surely—Ezra Blazer is a funny man—but at its core this is not a funny story at all. Rather, it is a story about the ferocity of literary ambition and the vicissitudes of apprenticeship—particularly when the apprentice is a young woman and the mentor is an older man. That is a story we have heard many times from the man’s point of view, where the woman usually features as a dangerous temptation or a fountain of youth—see J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace, or indeed Philip Roth’s Sabbath’s Theater.
Much more rarely do we hear this story from the young woman’s point of view. What’s so powerful and interesting about Asymmetry is that Halliday does not exactly undo that silencing; rather, she enacts it, and then explodes it. Alice remains a fairly reticent, even mute, character. Only occasionally in the first section of the novel does she even admit—to Ezra, or to herself—that she wants to be a writer. Instead, she is the passive object of his educational decisions: He is constantly telling her what to read, and Halliday incorporates big chunks of quotation from these Great Books (Camus, Twain, Primo Levi), as if to suggest how their voices are usurping Alice’s own. At the end of the “Folly” section, as Blazer goes into the hospital and Alice is confronted by the prospect of becoming his longterm caretaker, she is forced to answer the question that she has been avoiding all along. What is it she wants from Blazer—to be with him, or to be him?
Put this way, it becomes clear that Asymmetry can be read as Halliday’s response to one of Roth’s own most famous books, The Ghost Writer. This, too, is a tale of apprenticeship, but in this case the sexual dynamics are different, since both idol and worshipper are straight men. Nathan Zuckerman, Roth’s alter ego, goes to visit the great E.I. Lonoff—a figure often described as a version of Bernard Malamud. Roth makes clear that Zuckerman wants Lonoff’s blessing, but also wants to supplant him, both imaginatively and sexually, in the way that son-figures are supposed to supplant father-figures. The Ghost Writer dramatizes this contest by turning into a wild fantasy about the return of Anne Frank from the dead—a sign that Zuckerman’s imagination is equal to any subject, even the most outrageous. More concretely, Zuckerman ends up masturbating in Lonoff’s guest room, in a foolish but pointed declaration of his own potency.
In Asymmetry, the middle section—the story of Amar Jaafari—serves as Halliday’s version of Nathan Zuckerman’s Anne Frank fantasy. What we are reading here—as the clue in the last section reveals—is the novel that Alice will go on to write after breaking up with Ezra Blazer. And it is a novel so “asymmetrical” with the first section as to constitute a declaration of imaginative triumph. Everything about Amar—his experience, his range of knowledge, his tone of voice—is utterly different from what we have come to expect from Alice. As we learn about his childhood in Brooklyn, his periodic visits to his family in Iraq, and the way his fate has been shaped by American wars, it becomes clear that Halliday is engaged in a daring act of transposition. The power asymmetry between Alice and Ezra has morphed into much more profound and violent kinds of asymmetry—between the U.S. and the Middle East, and between state power and the individual child of immigrants.
The leap from the novel’s first section to its second is so great, and yet so intuitively logical, that it forces the reader to rethink the Alice section entirely: It is now clear that she is not a version of Lisa Halliday, but just one of the many voices Halliday can invent, if she chooses. 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.
We want to hear what you think. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.
“Alone Together, Together Alone”: On Lisa Halliday’s “Asymmetry”
By Lori Feathers
FEBRUARY 20, 2018
LISA HALLIDAY’S DEBUT, Asymmetry, is not a mystery novel, at least not in the way that we typically think about that genre. But there is most certainly a mystery at the novel’s core, one that arises from the book’s structure — two seemingly unrelated novellas appended by a short coda — rather than its plot. “Folly,” the first of the pair, centers on the romance between Ezra, a famous novelist in his 70s, and Alice, a twentysomething aspiring writer. The second, “Madness,” features Amar, an Iraqi American raised and living in New York City, as he reflects on the ways that his life has diverged from that of his older brother Sami, a Georgetown-educated doctor who has made his life in Iraq. These disparate narratives, each featuring a discrete cast of characters, invite readers to question whether there is a thread that connects the two novellas — and if so, what it might be? These questions will keep all but the most perceptive readers wondering until the novel’s final pages.
Less mysterious are the patent asymmetries between the novel’s actors — imbalances of age, worldview, values, and experience, which create persistent internal conflicts and affect how the characters view one another and themselves. Amar’s story opens with his detention at Heathrow Airport en route to join his family in Iraq. During his long wait and questioning by immigration officials, Amar recollects his childhood in New York with his parents and Sami, his previous family visits to Iraq, and past times spent with his estranged American girlfriend, Maddie.
Despite a shared upbringing by immigrant parents who very much wanted their sons to be and feel themselves fully American, the boys’ lives take very different paths. Amar lives with Maddie on the East Coast and works toward his doctorate on the economics of risk aversion. Sami, meanwhile, is drawn back to Iraq, where he uses his medical degree to care for casualties of the country’s sectarian violence, marries a local woman, and has a child. Although Amar admires Sami’s choice, he cannot fully comprehend his brother’s willingness to sacrifice a comfortable Western life for the hardships and dangers of Iraq. But there are fissures in Amar’s facade of a fully assimilated American. His penchant for postponing even the simplest gratifications, his need for consistency, and his belief in religiously ordained destiny chafe against the views of Maddie and their friends.
I could see why she [Maddie] thought me hypocritical. On the face of it, it’s paradoxical to be so cautious in life, so orderly and fastidious, while also claiming to place one’s faith in the ultimate agency of God […] But theological predestination and free will are not necessarily incompatible […] Allah will not change the condition of a people until they change what is in themselves. God has not predetermined the course of human history but rather is aware of all its possible courses and may alter the one we’re on in accordance with our will and the bounds of His universe.
In “Folly,” Ezra’s and Alice’s philosophical differences are, in many respects, the result of their vast age disparity. For Ezra, each day is a series of reminders of his own mortality. At the same time, Alice eagerly anticipates her bright future, and she uses Ezra’s fame and wealth as opportunities to expand her experiences and enjoy a luxurious lifestyle. While both Alice and Ezra find the 50-year age difference to be titillating in its impropriety, Alice becomes wary and impatient of the way that Ezra’s failing health dominates his conscience and, as a result, their relationship.
Alone together, together alone … Except of course they weren’t alone. Ezra’s pain was with them. Ezra, his pain, and Alice, barely tolerable envoy from the enraging world of the healthy.
The constancy of Ezra’s illnesses and Alice’s awareness that medical visits and prescription refills will be ever-present in their life together causes Alice to question the relationship. Will she be able to remain with him out of loyalty or gratitude?
Significantly (and without giving away Asymmetry’s secret), a common theme is present in Amar’s and Alice’s stories. In each, Halliday subtly examines whether fiction-writing has a purpose beyond art. That is, do authors, particularly privileged white authors, have an obligation to look beyond their lived experiences to write and engage readers about social and political issues? Or, conversely, is an author’s depiction of a culture or a place other than her own an inherently bankrupt act of cultural appropriation? Should authors write only what they know? Is autobiographical fiction the only authentic fiction? For Ezra, the answer is simple: there is no need for a writer to look beyond the boundaries of her personal life to create her art. Any work that is well done is an important work; its significance is not derivative of its topicality. Amar, on the other hand, struggles with the issue, because it is so closely tied to the way that he wants to be perceived, to his self-identification as an American.
Amar keeps a journal during his extended visits to Iraq, but finds that he is unable to write about the ongoing violence and how it affects the daily lives of his extended family. He reasons that his difficulty rests in the fact that he is an outsider. He cannot, in good conscience, claim to depict what he does not know personally, does not feel intimately.
After all, humility and silence are surely preferable to ignorance and imperiousness. And maybe East and West really are eternally irreconcilable — like a curve and its asymptote, geometrically fated never to intersect.
Amar marshals the writings of famous authors like Stephen Crane and Stendhal, as well as the opinion of his friend Alistair, an English journalist who spent time in Iraq, to bolster his justification for not writing about the turmoil in Iraq and to assuage his heavy conscience.
In exploring the creation of art and its purpose, and the authorial risks of cultural appropriation, Halliday has produced a skillfully executed, layered work — a novel about writers engaged in, and contemplative about, the act of writing — without the self-consciousness and overt intention that burdens so much metafiction. And while Asymmetry impresses at the structural level, it is above all Halliday’s superb storytelling that shines, a gift that she demonstrates by conveying with warmth, power, and empathy the individual journeys of diverse people aligned in their struggle to find identity, belonging, and purpose.
¤
Lori Feathers is a co-owner of Interabang Books in Dallas, Texas, and the store’s book buyer. She writes freelance book reviews, sits on the Board of the National Book Critics Circle, and is a fiction judge for the 2018 Best Translated Book Award. She can be found @lorifeathers.
Two Stories Harmonize in Lisa Halliday’s Deft Debut Novel
By Parul Sehgal
Feb. 6, 2018
Image
CreditAlessandra Montalto/The New York Times
Anthropologists studying a tribe in southern Africa in the 1970s distinguished between two kinds of stories: those told during daylight — gossipy anecdotes, your average water-cooler chat — and those told at night. Around the fire, stories turned starkly philosophical, full of allusions to the ancestors and the spirit world. Nighttime tales seemed to speak to a different human need.
Among the abundant pleasures of “Asymmetry,” a scorchingly intelligent first novel by Lisa Halliday, is that it satisfies both these appetites — it’s a clever comedy of manners set in Manhattan as well as a slowly unspooling tragedy about an Iraqi-American family, which poses deep questions about free will, fate and freedom, the all-powerful accident of one’s birth and how life is alchemized into fiction.
The first section follows Alice, a 20-something assistant at a publishing house, as she tumbles down a rabbit hole of a relationship with Ezra Blazer, a literary eminence 40 years her senior who bears a terrifically unabashed resemblance to Philip Roth (with whom Halliday had a relationship while in her 20s).
For all the obvious imbalances in their relationship, the pair meets at a moment when they’re both stuttering at a precipice. Alice longs to fully enter the world, to write and create; Ezra struggles with leaving it, his body starting to break down. Each becomes the custodian of the other’s dignity. He pays off her student loans and teaches her how to pronounce Camus. She picks up his Mylanta from the drugstore and gets him a new cord for his reading glasses. They watch baseball in bed together and talk writing. “If there’s a gun hanging on the wall in the first chapter, in a later chapter it must go off,” Ezra instructs Alice, passing along Chekhov’s famous rule. She responds in her customary deadpan, “If there’s a defibrillator hanging on the wall in the first chapter, in a later chapter must it go off?” (Does it ever.) In the distance, there is the rumbling of the American invasion of Iraq.
It’s a fresh twist on a familiar story — a May-December romance that so shrewdly anticipates and skirts expectations, I would not have minded if the novel had trundled along in this vein for another 200 pages. (“Asymmetry” joins a group of recent acclaimed debuts by women that revolve around the theme of a young woman, usually a would-be writer who takes up with an older male artist — Sally Rooney’s “Conversations With Friends” and Hermione Hoby’s “Neon in Daylight,” to name just two. The younger woman, handmaiden to genius, has been such a curiously central and peripheral figure in fiction; it’s as if she’s being energetically reclaimed.) But Halliday shifts course, and the book’s scope widens.
Image
Lisa HallidayCreditPhil Soheili
We’re transported to a holding room in London’s Heathrow Airport, where Amar, an Iraqi-American economist, has been detained on his way to Kurdistan to see his brother. This section is delivered in first person, and by a narrator as different from sweet, somnolent Alice as you can imagine. Amar is introspective, given not only to scrutinizing his own motives but those of everyone around him, of whole cultures — it’s how he has survived, or has tried to, as he’s watched his family and Iraq decimated by war.
The two stories never explicitly intersect. A third section, a radio interview with Ezra, hints at the link between them, but the game — and real pleasure — for the reader is to trace deeper resonances. What does it mean that these lives coexist? Alice in Manhattan, preoccupied with her erotic and intellectual ambitions, and Amar in Baghdad, watching his family’s life being choked by checkpoints, travel restrictions and constant threat.
The questions that crop up — about the illusion of choice and the fateful hand of luck, of birth — form the philosophical core of the novel but luckily, they come to us largely through Amar, and are handled lightly, leavened by his sarcasm, his mournful wit.
EDITORS’ PICKS
Safety Concerns Grow as Inmates Are Guarded by Teachers and Secretaries
‘God Bless America’: 100 Years of an Immigrant’s Anthem
1,600 Degrees and Mass Destruction: Explore a Town a Volcano Made a Tomb
As you search for the symmetries in “Asymmetry,” you won’t find one key that will unlock all its mysteries — this book is musical, not architectural in structure; themes don’t build on each other as much as chime and rhyme, repeat and harmonize, so what we receive is less a series of thesis statements than a shimmering web of associations; in short, the world as we know it.
You hunt for buried clues — the repeated references to a Stephen Crane quote, the mentions of an abortion. You do close readings of the fragments of “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” and “Eichmann in Jerusalem” that appear. On every page, you interrogate every detail: What are you doing here? Why do you matter? “Asymmetry” is not complicated, but it cannot be read complacently. Like it or not, it will make you a better reader, a more active noticer. It hones your senses.
Toward the end of the book, a radio interviewer asks Ezra what it’s like to grow old. He responds, “The short answer is that you go about your business reminding yourself to look at everything as though you’re looking at it for the last time.” Why wait? Halliday challenges us. Start now.
Follow Parul Sehgal on Twitter: @parul_sehgal.
Asymmetry
By Lisa Halliday
275 pages. Simon & Schuster. $26.
A version of this article appears in print on Feb. 6, 2018, on Page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: Two Tales Harmonize A Deft Debut Novel. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
Asymmetry Is About as Loving a Eulogy as You’ll Find for Philip Roth
Lisa Halliday’s novel did more to make me fond of him than his books.
By Willa Paskin
May 23, 20184:02 PM
The cover of Lisa Halliday's Asymmetry and a photo of Philip Roth.
Photo illustration by Slate. Photo by Bettmann via Getty Images.
Earlier this year, Lisa Halliday published her first novel, Asymmetry. The book, which has been rightly raved about, consists of two seemingly unrelated novellas and a coda that elegantly and gently ties them together. The second part of the novel is the first-person account of an Iraqi American, who has been detained in customs at Heathrow airport. It’s excellent, pulling this reader in even as she groused that the first part was over. And she groused. Because that first part of the novel is a kind of high-water mark of literary delectability, the story of a witty and lovely May-December romance, begun over Mister Softee, and including baseball games, sex, the evaporation of sex, and many a Searle coat, all shot through with the thrilling reading great literary gossip.
Halliday dated Philip Roth in her youth, when she worked at a publishing house. The first portion of Asymmetry concerns the relationship between a young woman named Alice, who works at a publishing house, and Ezra Blazer, a hugely famous novelist 40 years her senior who is always losing the Nobel Prize. Asymmetry is in deep conversation with what it means to write a “semi-autobiographical” novel. The second part of the book is a rousing testament to Halliday’s desire and ability to imagine herself outside of her own experience, to skirt the trap of the navel-gazing debut. Of the first part, which fictionalizes her own experiences, and is told in the third person, skittering across the protagonist’s internal life like a perfectly tossed skipping stone, Halliday said, “The entire book is an amalgam of details and impressions derived from experiences both romantic and platonic that I’ve had over the years, plus a healthy dose of research and imagination. I can understand why some people would associate Philip Roth with Ezra Blazer, but really they are not neatly correlated.”
The book made me sweet on Roth’s fictionalized doppelganger, with his jokes, his mellowness, his brain.
And yet, in the days after Roth’s death, Asymmetry is about as loving a eulogy to him as you will find anywhere—even though it is not only that. The book made me sweet on his fictionalized doppelganger, with his jokes, his mellowness, his brain—“she marveled at how his brain was right there, under her chin”—and his attentions. After meeting Alice in the park just once, he knows she wants to be a writer, though she hasn’t exactly said so. He may have a habit of picking up younger women and insist on seeing Alice on his terms, but his terms are gentle and involve a gorgeous house on Shelter Island, goodies from Zabar’s, excellent relationships with his exes, and concern for the age gap and her college loans. They tend to each other, including to, yes, his ejaculations like a “weak water bubbler,” which fade away long before the end of the relationship. Despite the seeming power imbalance of their arrangement, despite Ezra printing Alice business cards with a fake name so as not to attract undue gossip, their relationship is a genuine pas de deux, embarked upon knowingly by two people who are both, as Ezra says early on, deeply “game.”
Roth, of course, is a great, complicated novelist, a post-war titan who did not or could not always see female characters outside of context of the male libido. There is, perhaps, something loaded about reading a female novelist and her fully realized female character as a tenderizer of his particular macho genius. (Ezra is very compelling but imperfect; the coda includes him trying to pick up a married radio host with the same line he used on Alice.) I don’t want to suggest that Asymmetry is about Philip Roth, or that it contains the real Philip Roth, or the only Philip Roth, but it does contain a Philip Roth that you may not have seen before—and this glimpse of him is lovely.
Asymmetry’ Is a Brilliant Conversation Between Life and Art
Lisa Halliday's debut is one of 2018's first near-perfect novels.
by Sebastian Sarti
March 7, 2018
Comments 0
Sometimes it feels like we live in a time of perpetual crisis. The war in Afghanistan — the longest in U.S. history — limps toward a distant and dismal end. A global refugee crisis begs moral questions but receives, at best, bureaucratic answers. A decrepit huckster howls from the White House, targeting everyone from teachers to journalists and athletes.
In the midst of such global problems, fiction can seem like an indulgent distraction. Books that touch on topical issues might get a pass — it’s hard to deny the importance of To Kill a Mockingbird or War and Peace — but what about those quiet novels that explore one person’s intellectual development or emotional turmoil?
Taking this question as an entry point, Lisa Halliday has written a slyly ambitious debut novel, Asymmetry, that manages to deliver personal and global stories as if they were one.
Divided into two main parts and a coda, Asymmetry‘s unusual structure produces some surprising effects. The first section, “Folly,” concerns Alice, an editorial assistant at a fictional publishing house in New York, as she begins a romance with a lauded and much older writer — Ezra Blazer, whose similarities to Philip Roth are more than coincidental. The second part, “Madness,” follows Amar — an economist from Brooklyn born to Iraqi parents — during his detention by Heathrow immigration officials.
In “Folly,” Alice’s relationship with Ezra coincides with her progression as a thinker and writer. Their courtship is somewhat typical of a May-December romance — Ezra can be lecherous, charming and wounded all on a single page, and Alice is steadfastly passive.
They become a study in contrasts. Alice complains about her lackluster job and expresses anxiety about her place in the world, and Ezra, comfortable with his outsized position, supplies her with luxurious gifts: fine wine, caviar, cash for coats and air conditioning, and, most importantly, books. Alice wants to be a writer, but when Ezra asks about it, she responds that writing about herself doesn’t seem worthwhile when compared to important things like “War. Dictatorships. World affairs.”
Later, Amar faces these grandiose forces firsthand when he confronts the prejudiced Western eye (and the tumultuous political situation) in Iraq. Sitting in detention, he draws a broad sketch of his life, one that mixes kidnappings, coups, and murder with intimate moments about his brother’s love for the piano, their downstairs neighbors, and a failed romance with an actress-turned-doctor named Maddie.
The book’s two halves are also a contrast in styles. Either section could operate as an intelligent, stand-alone novella, but Amar’s story provides more immediate pleasures. While the prose in “Folly” skims the surface of Alice’s consciousness, “Madness” is filtered more directly through Amar’s perspective. The dialogue-driven scenes in the former give way to a complete lack of quotation marks in the latter.
Beginning with the first page, when Alice wonders, “What is the point of a book…that does not have any quotation marks?” Halliday often reminds us that we’re reading a novel. We always know what Alice is reading: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Eichmann in Jerusalem, an informational pamphlet at an abortion clinic. When she sees a moon and thinks of it as “the received light of the sun,” it becomes “no longer Celine’s moon, nor Hemingway’s, nor Genet’s, but Alice’s.” As Alice enters into conversation with these past writers, Halliday, whose biography often mirrors her protagonist’s, does so as well.
As the shared elements between the book’s halves become increasingly conspicuous, they begin to suggest a shared consciousness, in a twist that the coda makes explicit. By uniting Amar’s and Alice’s stories, Halliday refortifies the differences between Alice and herself, and between autobiography and fiction. Like Alice, Halliday was a twenty-something Harvard graduate who worked in the publishing industry when she began dating an esteemed and much older writer, Philip Roth. But in these pages, Halliday suggests it would be foolish to map Alice’s story onto her own.
With a playful attitude toward her own life, Halliday both embraces the genre of autofiction — practiced by writers like Karl Ove Knausgaard, Sheila Heiti, and Ben Lerner — and shuns any of its supposed restrictions, not unlike Rachel Cusk’s current trilogy, Outline, Transit, and the upcoming Kudos.
Asymmetry doesn’t solve the problem that, as Amar puts it, even “someone who imagines for a living is forever bound by the ultimate constraint…there’s no getting around the fact that she’s always the one holding up the mirror,” but Halliday does suggest that if you think a young woman’s literary development is not important enough to occupy shelf space, or that a Muslim man’s detention requires too much imaginative empathy, then you should probably consider a mirror’s regenerative powers, tilt it, and observe the image anew.
9781501166761_7333bFICTION
Asymmetry by Lisa Halliday
Simon & Schuster
Published February 6, 2018
Lisa Halliday grew up in Medfield, Massachusetts and currently lives in Milan, Italy. Her work has appeared in The Paris Review and she is the recipient of a 2017 Whiting Award for Fiction. Asymmetry is her first novel.
Help the Chicago Review of Books and Arcturus make the literary conversation more inclusive by becoming a member, patron, or sponsor. Each option comes with its own perks and exclusive content. Click here to learn more.
TagsAsymmetry • Lisa Halliday
0 comments on “‘Asymmetry’ Is a Brilliant Conversation Bet
Lisa Halliday’s Tremendous New Experiment of a Novel
By
Christian Lorentzen
In 1960 Philip Roth wrote: “The American writer in the middle of the twentieth century has his hands full in trying to understand, describe, and then make credible much of American reality. It stupefies, it sickens, it infuriates, and finally it is even a kind of embarrassment to one’s own meager imagination. The actuality is continually outdoing our talents, and the culture tosses up figures almost daily that are the envy of any novelist.” By the first decade of this century, the conditions Roth was describing were arguably more acute, yet the more our media was saturated with stories of mass violence, the high crimes of respectable people, and other grotesqueries, the easier it was for those living comfortable middle-class lives, including writers, to view such stories at a distance, to see them not as part of one’s own reality or a shared national reality, but as simply the daily revolting flotsam of the internet and cable news. At the same time, by the end of the first year of the Bush administration, the major story was the projection of American power and violence abroad. A certain kind of person could follow the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan on a daily basis and feel no personal connection to them: conflicts initiated by a president you didn’t vote for, fought by fellow citizens you’d never met and weren’t related to, waged in countries you knew next to nothing about.
The disconnect has presented problems for American writers trying to portray the country’s reality. The problem is less one of making that reality credible, since we’re all used to hearing that the incredible happens on a daily basis, than of making it coherent. It’s an impossible task because American reality isn’t coherent, even if novels about it ought to be. There was, of course, the obvious challenge of the 9/11 novel, and for several years novelists applied themselves to the task of marrying a spectacular historical event to the private lives that carried on in the shadow of the events. There has been war fiction authored by veterans, journalist observers, and stay-at-home writers adopting various perspectives, most commonly that of the traumatized soldier returned home. In many of these works, especially the best of them, Atticus Lish’s Preparation for the Next Life, it’s the disconnect that’s dramatized in the form of trauma and its echoes.
In her first novel Lisa Halliday adopts a conceptual strategy declared in the book’s title, Asymmetry. It’s a title with multiple valences, but it signals that Halliday won’t be imposing coherence on her protagonists and their two very different stories. The first section, “Folly,” is the story of a young woman in New York with a job in publishing, Mary-Alice Dodge, called Alice, to heighten her innocence and wonder as she takes the elevator through the looking glass to the Upper West Side apartment where she conducts an affair with a much older and much celebrated novelist (think of one whose name rhymes with “still hip cloth”) named Ezra Blazer. “Madness,” the second part, is narrated by Amar, an American son of Iraqi Kurdish immigrants who tells his family history while detained by immigration agents at Heathrow. Ezra has the last word in the coda, a transcript of his appearance on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs after winning the 2011 Nobel Prize for Literature. His remarks are the metafictional bow that ties this very self-conscious novel together.
Halliday is in her early 40s, lives in Milan, and worked for many years for the Wylie Agency in New York and London. She published her first short story, “Stump Louis,” in the Paris Review in 2005. It was fiction very much of its time, with its mix of whimsy and tragedy, set in a gauzily slapstick 1940s. A teenage piano whiz gets his own radio show, taking calls from listeners trying to name a song he can’t play off the top of his head. It’s a big hit, and no caller stunts him until the night Pearl Harbor is attacked. An emergency newsflash prevents the hero’s on-air embarrassment, but the war, the last sentence reveals, kills him. There were a lot of stories like this in the 2000s, when nostalgia for the generation that experienced World War II and the Holocaust offered young writers an easy way into history. Their (our) generation had been told history ended in the 1990s. After it became obvious this wasn’t true, it been an open question what stakes these writers have in history as it’s transpired and whether it’s better for them to tell their own stories or those of others.
Within Asymmetry’s framework, Alice is an authorial alter ego and the first section a teasing autofiction. (An author could invent the affair described in the book by reverse-engineering the one described in, say, Exit Ghost.) Readers from publishing circles will recognize tweaked versions of familiar rumors. Ezra is constantly being denied the Nobel, which is awarded instead to Imre Kertesz, to J.M. Coetzee, to Elfriede Jelinek. We hear of the start of the Iraq War, the announcement of the Medicare prescription-drug benefit, and the blackout of the summer of 2003. Ezra buys her novels to read, gives her cash to buy clothes (or whatever she wants), and pays off her Harvard student loans. The age gap allows them to act like adolescents together. They speak in code. She picks him up goodies from Zabar’s. They spend a lot of time watching baseball together, mostly the dramatic Red Sox versus Yankees playoffs of 2003 and 2004. (Halliday wisely elides the Red Sox 2004 World Series victory, a dull triumph in four games against the Cardinals.) Sex is treated coyly, but we know his back problems are an issue. They aren’t the only issue: He gets a defibrillator (which is likened, in a joke, to Chekhov’s gun on the wall in the first act), is at times immobilized, and at the section’s end lies in a hospital bed.
The affair is by turns sweet, naughty, and achingly poignant. Alice’s life outside it is dreary. She’s the child of divorced parents, and her father is a conspiracy theorist and a gun nut. She has an elderly neighbor creeping into advanced stages of dementia. Her job is a drag. A one-night stand with a colleague results in a condom malfunction, a pregnancy, and an abortion. The instructions for clinical procedure are relayed outside the narration and in italics — the same way we encounter texts from the weighty books Ezra gives Alice to read (the Holocaust figures in these texts, among other world-historical atrocities). In other words, the experience is part of her education. Ezra intuits that Alice is a writer herself and asks her what she writes about: “Other people. People more interesting than I am …
Muslim hot dog sellers.” The conversation goes on:
Ezra looked skeptical. “Do you write about your father?”
“No.”
“You should. It’s a gift.”
“I know, but writing about myself doesn’t seem important enough.”
“As opposed to?”
“War. Dictatorships. World affairs.”
“Forget about world affairs. World affairs can take care of themselves.”
“They’re not doing a very good job of it.”
Soon Alice starts “to consider really rather seriously whether a former choirgirl from Massachusetts might be capable of conjuring the consciousness of a Muslim man.”
Amar’s story is that attempt at conjuring. It’s not such a far stretch. The child of immigrants, born on an airplane passing over Cape Cod and raised in Bay Ridge, Amar is another American striver, his youth spent alphabetizing baseball cards and studying for the PSATs. He’s an Ivy League graduate, a premed ace turned economist, the author of a dissertation on risk aversion, so he’s set for a career as the sort of technocrat who might advise against starting the Iraq War. He’s mostly abstemious and little priggish, as we learn when he accompanies a friend and future girlfriend to an abortion clinic. That girlfriend, Maddy, has a few other things in common with Alice: a poetic disposition and the experience of seeing her parents split when she was very young. Amar’s own family maintains deep ties to Iraqi Kurdistan, where his brother works as a doctor and his relatives endure the collateral damage of the U.S. invasion. Amar’s previous visits to Iraq — before his detention at Heathrow, which occurs just after Obama’s election — and his friendship with a British journalist allow Halliday to stage discussions of the war and its consequences. A few incidents in Amar’s story take on the quality of a thriller.
So which is “more interesting,” the folly of a young woman’s unlikely romance or the madness of a young man’s encounter with world affairs? In terms of tone and style, Halliday stacks the deck in favor of the latter: Amar’s first-person narration is more lushly furnished on the prose level than the fragmentary scenes between Ezra and Alice, which are told in the third person and largely through dialogue, with enough peeks into her head to convey the familiar ups and downs of the young side of asymmetric love. And what difference does it make to think of Amar as Alice’s, rather than Halliday’s, creation? In the coda, Ezra describes her project: “a novel that on its surface would seem to have nothing to do with its author, but in fact is a kind of veiled self-portrait of someone trying to transcend her provenance, her privilege, her naiveté.” It’s hard to deny, by the novel’s end, that Alice/Halliday has pulled off this stunt of transcendence. As with a gymnast who’s just stuck a perfect routine, your impulse is to ask her, what’s next?
Lisa Halliday's controversial first novel mines her affair with Philip Roth
Skip to sections navigation
Skip to content
Skip to footer
Our network
The Sydney Morning Herald
Movies
TV & Radio
Music
Celebrity
Books
Comedy
Dance
Musicals
Opera
Theatre
Art & design
TV guide
EntertainmentBooks
Lisa Halliday's controversial first novel mines her affair with Philip Roth
By Alexandra Alter
30 March 2018 — 12:02pm
Send via Email
In the opening scene of Lisa Halliday's debut novel, Asymmetry, Alice, a young editorial assistant at a publishing house, is reading on a bench in Manhattan's Upper West Side when a famous novelist sits down beside her holding an ice-cream cone. When they meet again on the same bench two weeks later, the novelist, Ezra Blazer, brings two cones and offers her one. After she accepts it, quickly rationalising that "multiple-Pulitzer Prize winners don't go around poisoning people", Ezra asks her, "Are you game?"
It's not a terribly artful seduction, but soon, Alice and Ezra – who is four decades her senior – plunge into a clandestine romance.
Lisa Halliday's Asymmetry has caused a stir because of the unlikely romance at its core.
Lisa Halliday's Asymmetry has caused a stir because of the unlikely romance at its core.
Photo: CALOGERO RUSSO
Asymmetry has caused a stir because of the unlikely romance at its core. To literary insiders, Ezra Blazer bears a striking resemblance to Philip Roth. Like Roth, Blazer is a towering American literary icon who served in the US Army, published short stories in The Paris Review and The New Yorker, won the National Book Award for his first book, and went on to win virtually every other significant literary award. A running joke early on in the narrative is that Ezra, like Roth, is a constant runner-up for the Nobel.
Ezra mirrors Roth in other, more personal ways: Hhe's irresistibly funny, with a repertoire of Jewish humour, suffers from chronic back pain and heart disease, is a staunch atheist and baseball fan and leads a quiet existence on the Upper West Side.
Asymmetry, by Lisa Halliday.
Asymmetry, by Lisa Halliday.
The likeness is no accident. Halliday, 41, and Roth, 84, are good friends. And for a time, when she was in her 20s and working at the Wylie Agency (which represents him) they had a romantic relationship. They've remained friendly, and Roth read a proof of the novel and sent her an email calling the novel "a considerable achievement", she said.
Halliday – who lives in Milan, Italy, with her husband and infant daughter – said much about the character and the relationship was fictionalised.
"Yes, some people are going to think of Philip Roth, but Ezra Blazer is a work of fiction," she said. "The entire book is an amalgam of details and impressions derived from experiences both romantic and platonic that I've had over the years, plus a healthy dose of research and imagination."
In evoking the relationship, Halliday said she saw it as a way to explore a young writer's creative struggles and to show how experience, along with imagination, shapes fiction.
"I wanted to write about an aspiring writer who was having trouble under what I think Harold Bloom called 'the anxiety of influence', because I certainly felt that, working right at the heart of publishing," she said. "To go back to Philip, I wanted Alice's relationship to be with someone of that stature because it worked for the story."
Asymmetry is hardly a conventional semi-autobiographical first novel about a young writer's coming-of-age. It unfolds in three disparate sections that don't intersect in obvious ways.
There are subtle clues connecting the disjointed narrative strands, and recurring themes that take on new resonance as the novel progresses: the relationship between autobiography and fiction, the power of imagination, and how art can provoke empathy for people whose backgrounds and experiences diverge from our own.
Halliday didn't emerge fully-formed out of nowhere – she published a short story in The Paris Review in 2005, and forged connections in the literary world through her work as an agent. But she's had a surprising trajectory and is something of a late bloomer, having spent nearly two decades working on her fiction largely in private before submitting a book for publication.
After graduating from Harvard in 1998, she got a job as an assistant literary agent at the Wylie Agency and was soon promoted. Working with accomplished writers might intimidate some aspiring novelists, but Halliday found it exhilarating and began to think about writing fiction.
"Prior to that, I thought there was some sort of magic involved and that I just didn't have that magic," she said. She started getting up at five in the morning to write. Roth's dedication to writing, the daily act and routine of it, made an impression on her, she said.
In 2006, Halliday left the agency to focus on fiction. She moved to Milan in 2011 with her husband, who works at an Italian publishing house, and began working on Asymmetry. When her agent submitted it to publishers in the summer of 2016, it sparked a heated auction between eight publishing houses.
Halliday no longer has the luxury of labouring in obscurity. She's already writing another novel, set partly in Italy, which explores how conspiracy theories take hold. It tackles a theme that has long preoccupied her: the blurred boundaries between fiction and reality.
ASSYMETRY
Lisa Halliday
Granta $27.99.
Send via Email
Most Viewed in Entertainment
New Zealand reporter attacked on air by angry football fan
New Zealand reporter attacked on air by angry football fan
Netflix dethrones HBO in stunning Emmy field
Netflix dethrones HBO in stunning Emmy field
'Weirdest interview ever': Republican figures pranked by Sacha Baron Cohen
'Weirdest interview ever': Republican figures pranked by Sacha Baron Cohen
The Handmaid's Tale season two finale divides fans
The Handmaid's Tale season two finale divides fans
Defamed Rebel Wilson turns to High Court
Defamed Rebel Wilson turns to High Court
One of the funniest people on Australian TV is now ... a quiz-show host?
One of the funniest people on Australian TV is now ... a quiz-show host?
Morning & Afternoon Newsletter
Delivered Mon–Fri.
Email address
By signing up you accept our privacy policy and conditions of use
The Sydney Morning Herald
Twitter
Facebook
Instagram
RSS
Our Sites
The Sydney Morning Herald
The Age
Brisbane Times
The Canberra Times
WAtoday
The Australian Financial Review
Domain
Traveller
Good Food
Executive Style
The Store by Fairfax
Drive
Adzuna
RSVP
Essential Baby
Essential Kids
Weatherzone
Classifieds
Tributes
Celebrations
Place your ad
Commercial Real Estate
Oneflare
Nabo
The Sydney Morning Herald
Contact & support
Advertise with us
Newsletters
Accessibility guide
Sitemap
Products & Services
Subscription packages
Subscriber benefits
My account
Subscriptions FAQs
Today's Paper
Fairfax Media
Photo sales
Purchase front pages
Fairfax syndication
Fairfax events
Fairfax careers
Conditions of use
Privacy policy
Press Council
Copyright © 2018Fairfax Media
Please use the sharing tools found via the email icon at the top of articles. Copying articles to share with others is a breach of FT.com T&Cs and Copyright Policy. Email licensing@ft.com to buy additional rights. Subscribers may share up to 10 or 20 articles per month using the gift article service. More information can be found at https://www.ft.com/tour.
https://www.ft.com/content/cab5e814-287a-11e8-9274-2b13fccdc744
Asymmetry by Lisa Halliday — a world of difference
An exceptional debut examines imbalances in love and geopolitics
© Gueorgui Pinkhassov/Magnum Photos
Save to myFT
Luke Brown March 23, 2018
Print this page
0
Alice, a 25-year-old editor who wants to write, is reading in Central Park one day in 2002 when a famous author in his seventies sits next to her and strikes up a conversation. At the end of their third meeting he asks, “Are you game?” “No reason not to be,” she says. “There are plenty of reasons not to be,” he corrects her, and the novel examines these as they begin a cautious and asymmetrical love affair, one marked by differences in age, wealth, accomplishment and health.
We are surely intended to recognise the real novelist given the unlikely name of Ezra Blazer — this writer who divides his time between the Upper West Side and a country house to work in seclusion; this consistently overlooked contender for the Nobel Prize with back problems and a history of heart disease; this fierce and provocative master with a Jewish sense of humour: enter Philip Roth.
Martin Amis wrote about Roth that “a curious side-effect of autobiographical fiction is that it puts the reader in a state of salacious curiosity about the author’s private life”. In Roth’s later works, his alter ego Nathan Zuckerman underwent a change in order to focalise narratives that were not about him, becoming a “Roth” made celibate by prostate cancer, living far from Manhattan, insulated from the heartbreak and madness of sexual attachment and so better able to describe the drama of others. Blazer is in a way this Zuckerman’s counterlife, a version of such an author in later life in which he is still exposed to the potential humiliation of attachment, to being understood through the outlines the world will apply to scandalous asymmetries of age and money: the lecher and the gold-digger.
Halliday — who was romantically involved with Roth when she was in her twenties — wants us to be more “imaginative and sympathetic” in our understanding of Alice and Ezra, whose love affair is the focus of the first half of the novel. But those who by reading or reputation find Roth domineering will have their hackles raised by Blazer. He searches her on her first visit to his apartment “for security reasons”, before tossing her “disgrace” of a wallet in his bin, and buying her a new one. Halliday conveys an affecting relationship that is not sentimentalised by ignoring its inequalities, the extent to which each must submit to the other. She gains an educator, who she worries might have “already said everything she wanted to say”. She loses out too: he chooses and preserves the distance between them by withholding his phone number, and when she gains leverage over him it is because his health is diminishing. She will need to decide whether to spend her youth looking after an old man, and be left alone afterwards.
The progression to Alice’s dilemma is delineated with subtlety and economy: three years go by in Nobel Prize winners and baseball series in a Manhattan in which the invasion of Iraq is registered by commentators speculating about which pitchers would make good soldiers. Alice can’t believe writing about herself in this protected environment could be interesting; she wants to imagine herself into the drama of world history, to know whether “a former choirgirl from Massachusetts might be capable of conjuring the consciousness of a Muslim man”.
Halliday attempts to answer this with the second half of the novel. An Iraqi-American economist is trapped in immigration in Heathrow, on his way to Baghdad. There he is hoping to see his brother, who is risking danger to play a part in the future of Iraq, a part the more cautious narrator has refused. This section, “Madness”, narrates the failed attempt of someone whose family are at the centre of world events to keep them at bay; the earlier section, “Folly”, is an account of someone insulated from pain seeking “a reckless vector”.
Halliday’s structure shows exquisite control of leitmotif and patterning; each half gradually intensifies in emotion to reach a devastating climax. The weakest note is the epilogue, a transcript of a Desert Island Discs interview, in which Blazer is reported to have won the Nobel Prize, approves of the method of the novel we are close to finishing, and attempts to seduce Kirsty Young, the presenter. I see why it is there: to make it easier for the reader to connect the two narratives that have gone before, but it lacks their lightness of touch. Blazer’s record choices do, however, make for a great playlist, and listening to them will call further attention to the ambitious music of this exceptional debut.
Asymmetry, by Lisa Halliday, Granta, RRP£14.99/Simon & Schuster, RRP$26, 276 pages
Join our online book group on Facebook at FTBooksCafe. Subscribe to FT Life on YouTube for the latest FT Weekend videos
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2018. All rights reserved.
Asymmetry review: A novel that puts a refreshing trust in its readers
Lisa Halliday’s debut novel has three discrete parts, and the reward is in seeing how they connect
Lisa Halliday: a novel of unusual poise, with an unusual structure
Lisa Halliday: a novel of unusual poise, with an unusual structure
Sean Hewitt
Sat, Mar 10, 2018, 06:00
First published:
Sat, Mar 10, 2018, 06:00
Book Title:
Asymmetry
ISBN-13:
978-1783783601
Author:
Lisa Halliday
Publisher:
Granta
Guideline Price:
£14.99
In the final section of Lisa Halliday’s tripartite debut novel, Asymmetry, the aged novelist Ezra Blazer is being featured on Desert Island Discs. One of the novel’s three main characters, Blazer chooses Isaac Albéniz’s piano suite Iberia as one of his selections, “because each of the pieces builds on the last, they’re discrete and yet all the richer for being heard together, and you just ache with the mounting intensity of it”. The asymmetries of Halliday’s assured debut, its daring structure placing three distinct sections obliquely alongside each other, might be similarly described, though the experience of Asymmetry is often one of withheld rather than released intensity.
The novel’s first part, “Folly”, traces the uncomfortable, imbalanced relationship between Alice Dodge, an editorial assistant in a major New York publishing firm, and successful older writer Blazer, a character who has garnered much attention in reactions to Halliday’s novel for his close resemblance to Philip Roth. Halliday herself, in fact, has acknowledged Roth’s influence on Blazer in an interview with the New York Times. The degree to which “Folly” may or may not intersect with Halliday’s own life, however, is immaterial, especially since Asymmetry is largely a novel about fiction, about imagination, and about the possibilities and limits of empathy.
Gaslighting
In “Folly”, Alice is quiet, apologetic, subject to the gaslighting and power-plays of her older lover, who is by turns manipulative and vulnerable. Only in a few moments do we learn that she herself wants to be a writer, that this relationship is a sort of smothering apprenticeship (at times, Alice’s voice is almost suffocated by passages from books Ezra has recommended to her), though this is in fact key to the novel. At one point, Ezra tells Alice to avoid world affairs in her writing, and to draw instead on her personal life, so that she begins “to consider really rather seriously whether a former choirgirl from Massachusetts might be capable of conjuring the consciousness of a Muslim man”.
The second part of Asymmetry, “Madness”, is Halliday’s attempt to do just that, and it is a testament to the great intelligence of this novel, and to Halliday’s trust in the reader, that she allows us to connect the parts for ourselves, placing each in oblique relation to the other, so that the experience of reading her work is one of feeling the mind gradually light up, recalling echoes, returning signals, mapping its own workings, creating a sort of metafiction of its own.
“Madness”, which follows an Iraqi-American man, Amar Ala Jaafari, who is being detained at Heathrow border control, is the novel’s most accomplished section: its prose is spare but unsparing, especially in the matter-of-fact violence it relates. It turns what might have seemed like self-indulgence in “Folly” into a retrospective meditation on empathy and imagination, adding an urgency and political clout to the asymmetries of the title – we are no longer just looking at the (substantial) imbalances of love and money, age and gender; now, these are expanded into global asymmetries of power in terms of race, violence, and privilege.
Patronising arrogance
“Ezra Blazer’s Desert Island Discs”, the final part of the novel, acts as a sort of coda (in fact, it offers a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it clue to Asymmetry’s entire structure). Here, Blazer returns to his characteristic blend of wisdom and patronising arrogance (“I consider my girlfriends my children”), flirting (and eventually leering after) the female interviewer, but never attempting to conclude the novel, the loose ends of which are left tantalisingly untied.
This is a masterfully written book “about the extent to which we’re able to penetrate the looking-glass and imagine a life, indeed a consciousness, that goes some way to reduce the blind spots in our own”. It is difficult to summarise without resorting to dichotomies (it offers one thing, then quickly reverses or questions it), and becomes more fascinating after you’ve finished reading.
In Wallace Stevens’s poem Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird, the poet writes: “I do not know which to prefer, / The beauty of inflections / Or the beauty of innuendoes, / The blackbird whistling / Or just after.” Halliday’s novel gives us the joy of both inflections and innuendos, the subtlety of its prose being revived as we read by the sounding-off of echoes and memories in the mind. This is a novel of unusual poise, with an unusual structure, but more than this, it places unusual trust in us as readers, asking us to consider our own imagination, our culpability, and ultimately urging us to experiment with the reaches of our empathy.
Sat, Mar 10, 2018, 06:00
First published:
Sat, Mar 10, 2018, 06:00
Lisa Halliday
2017 Winner in Fiction
Lisa Halliday's work has appeared in The Paris Review. She previously worked at The Wylie Agency and is a freelance editor and translator in Milan. Her novel, Asymmetry, will be published by Simon and Schuster in February, 2018.
Asymmetry
A Novel
So I came home. To Pittsburgh. My parents were there, and my sister was there, married with children now, and certainly after Paris that wasn’t for me. I’ve always loved Pittsburgh, especially when it looked its worst. I’ve written about that, of course: Pittsburgh before they cleaned it up. Now it’s this immaculate city, all finance and technology, but back then you could die just from taking a breath on the street. The air was black and steaming with smog—“hell with the lid off” they used to say—and there was the clanging of trains, and the great mills, a very dramatic place, and maybe had I stayed and got lucky I might have been the Balzac of Pittsburgh. But I had to escape my family. I had to go to New York.
Selected Works
Asymmetry: A Novel
The Paris Review: Number 174, Summer 2005
read more >
Outside Links
Stump Louie (The Paris Review)
Art of Fiction Interview with Louise Erdrich (The Paris Review)
From the Selection Committee
Lisa Halliday’s singular and beautifully-written novel is impossible to put down, and to pin down. It shifts before our eyes from the tale of a literary-world, May-December love affair to the first-person account of an Iraqi-American economist detained at Heathrow Airport. She treats these characters with such integrity and respect they seem corporeal. Nothing, we realize, is as it seems, and it’s deeply affecting to discover not only how Halliday’s narratives resolve but how they connect to one another. She has written a bold, elegant examination of the dynamics of love, power, ambition, and the ways we try to find our place in the world, whether at 25 or 75. Her crisply crafted sentences exude the inviting quiet of an assured artist – all this while posing arresting questions about the very nature of fiction itself.
< Less
Lisa Halliday’s Asymmetry Is All About A Lopsided Romance
By Sarah Begley February 1, 2018
Lisa Halliday’s debut novel, Asymmetry, begins with a lopsided affair–a perfect vehicle for a story of inexperience and advantage. This romance is between Alice, a young woman in publishing, and Ezra Blazer, a literary éminence grise, who resembles a certain real-life novelist who is chronically on Nobel wish lists. The details of their relationship are sometimes painfully precise, but Alice’s emotions are mostly left to guesswork.
Just as there is something aslant between Alice and Ezra, there is asymmetry between the first half of the book and the second, which focuses on Amar Ala Jaafari, an Iraqi-American man detained at Heathrow Airport. The shift in subject matter complements one in style: the writing is now explicitly emotional, and so far from the understatement of the first half that you might think it was a different book written by another author. Which is Halliday’s delicious trick.
As Ezra says at the end, his “young friend” has written a “veiled portrait of someone determined to transcend her provenance, her privilege, her naiveté.” Alice and Amar may be naive, but Halliday is knowing–about isolation, dissatisfaction and the pain of being human.
This appears in the February 12, 2018 issue of TIME.
Review: Asymmetry by Lisa Halliday — a tale of love and Roth
There’s much more to this writer than her affair with a literary giant, says James Marriott
James Marriott
February 17 2018, 12:01am, The Times
Books
Phillip Roth, widely assumed to be the inspiration for Ezra Blazer
Phillip Roth, widely assumed to be the inspiration for Ezra Blazer
MAGNUM PHOTOS
Share
Save
When she was in her mid-twenties Lisa Halliday had an affair with the novelist Philip Roth. He was in his sixties. As American critics have already noted, Asymmetry, her debut novel, seems to be a fictionalised account of that relationship (though Halliday told The New York Times that the fictional relationship and the real one “are not neatly correlated”). Halliday is a talented enough writer that this uncommonly juicy chunk of literary gossip is not the most interesting thing about her book.
But let’s talk about those juicy bits first. Asymmetry looks like a valuable addition to the burgeoning corpus of first-hand accounts of what it’s like to have sex with Philip Roth. His second wife, Claire Bloom, wrote an unflattering memoir of their marriage called Leaving a Doll’s House. Roth is widely thought to have written a fictionalised version of the relationship into his novel I Married a Communist. And that’s not to mention his 1988 autobiography, The Facts, which gives a rundown of the most important relationships of his life, from his college girlfriend “Polly Bates” (a pseudonym) to his affair with moneyed, patrician “May Aldridge” (another pseudonym).
Halliday’s book is split into three parts. It is the first of these that deals with an affair between a young publishing assistant named Alice (we assume based on Halliday) and Ezra Blazer, an impossibly distinguished elderly writer (Roth). Both Blazer and Roth are repeatedly passed over for the Nobel prize in literature and both have heroically complicated romantic pasts.
In the novel Blazer boasts: “Long before the sexual revolution began in the Sixties I was one of the generations who hit the beaches in the Fifties.” And he’s still going strong 40-odd years later — not withstanding three spine operations and the difficulties of having sex on an orthopaedic mattress. Roth fanciers will find lots to goggle at (did Halliday take Polaroids of the old literary lion wearing just his T-shirt like Alice does in the book?). This first apparently autobiographical section is sweetly told if rather slight and meandering. It’s probably most interesting for its gossip value. In the book’s second part Halliday switches tack and gives us the reverie of an Iraqi-American stuck in airport security. The third part is the transcript of Blazer’s interview on Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs.
That awkward jamming together of near-autobiography and fiction is a mostly unnecessary bit of fashionable trickery (celebrity Brooklyn litterateur Nicole Krauss did something similar in last year’s Forest Dark about the break-up of her relationship with fellow writer Jonathan Safran Foer). Yes, recurring themes and images are cleverly threaded through the three sections and, yes, she has clever stuff to say about how and why writers should inhabit other consciousnesses. But this is by now well-trodden ground.
Halliday is a good enough novelist that she doesn’t need to hedge her powerful imagination with clever-clever structures and “tropes”. The airport-set second section, which trips around the life of Iraqi-American Amar is the book’s strongest. It’s full of engaging snatches of invention (a feckless piano-obsessed brother, an awkward spell volunteering in a children’s hospital) and a willingness to tackle big themes (the Iraq war) and travel ambitiously (Iraq, Kurdistan, Britain, America). That’s not to mention her skill at minting images that shine as brightly as new coins.
Halliday should ditch the autobiography; she is good at making stuff up. If you’re after young novelists capable of writing something big, engaging and Jonathan-Franzeny, Halliday is one of them. Reading Asymmetry is like listening to a talented music student running through her scales and arpeggios. She knows every one of the novelist’s notes and trills. Now, it’s time to get out of the conservatoire. I’m sure there’s a symphony to be written.
Asymmetry by Lisa Halliday, Granta, 275pp; £14.99
Asymmetry – Lisa Halliday
by Alec Joyner
Asymmetry cover[Simon & Schuster; 2018]
At the very middle of Lisa Halliday’s deftly textured debut novel, Asymmetry — at the hinge between its two faces — one main character says to another, “We’re going to be fine.” He’s referring to their romantic relationship. But Asymmetry’s achievement is to ask, without shouting, what overtones his phrase might set ringing, and on what privilege his assurance might rest. If Ezra and Alice are never, ever getting back together (an open question), it’s not just because Alice no longer wants Ezra to be the “you” to her “me.” It’s mostly because she is beginning to care about bigger, more political meanings of “we” (and “fine”). Her focus on language, here and elsewhere, is not incidental: she is beginning to care about these things as a writer.
Ezra is Ezra Blazer, an aging, Jewish eminence of American fiction, libidinous and witty, with multiple Pulitzers to his name but no Nobel, at least not yet. Alice is Mary-Alice Dodge, a young editorial assistant and aspiring writer, at turns slapstick-impish and deadly earnest. She first meets Ezra on a sidewalk in the neighborhood where they both live, Manhattan’s Upper West Side, and works to maintain a sense of agency and perspective as he treats her to a Wonderland of sugar-daddy sentimental education, equal parts designer fur coats and literary greatest hits of twentieth-century Europe, from the moral ministrations of Hannah Arendt to the scatological musings of Jean Genet and James Joyce.
Many readers will recognize in Ezra the telltale figure of Philip Roth, and some might learn that Halliday worked at the Wylie Agency, which has long represented Roth, in the George W. Bush-era years in which Alice’s section of the novel takes place. But if Asymmetry is a roman à clef tempting prurient or insider-baseball curiosity, the key that unlocks its biographical origins is hardly the most interesting one Halliday puts at the reader’s disposal. The baseball most prominently on display, quaintly, is the kind played by the Yankees and Red Sox, which Alice loves, and on the whole the book is much more than a tell-all memoir about an affair with Philip Roth, not least because it’s not a memoir, it doesn’t tell all, and Ezra and Alice’s relationship is not exactly what “affair” suggests, since no one is cheating.
There is, what’s more, the other side of the hinge. After 120 pages of Alice, the reader is abruptly greeted by Amar Ala Jaafari, an economist the same age as Alice, born high above her native Massachusetts — aboard the plane that brought his Iraqi family from Baghdad to New York, leaving him with “two passports, two nationalities, no native soil.” At the end of 2008, he travels from the US to Iraq in search of his older brother, Sami, who, having resettled in relatively peaceful Kurdistan, has mysteriously disappeared. On his way, he is detained for vague reasons in a labyrinthine border-control facility within Heathrow Airport.
Elaborating on this doubly awful bind in grandiloquent paragraphs, punctuated intermittently by the terse Heathrow interrogations, Amar unfolds for the reader much of his life story. The major turns, in his dextrous, non-linear account, are the breakup of his intense relationship with his white college girlfriend, Maddie; his subsequent career change from medicine to economics, better to suit his anxious, risk-averse disposition; and Sami’s repatriation to Iraq amid ever-increasing turmoil, including personal danger for their politically active Baghdadi Shiite family.
So: one of these novellas is not like the other. The asymmetry, of course, is very much the point, and the contrast is inherently political. Together, the two parts ask, What ‘we’ can hold us? Also, How wide is the lens when you, reader, say ‘we’? Who and what do you leave outside the frame? Who and what, within the frame, do you nonetheless blur or elide? What power, in the framing and the blurring, do you wield? These questions, which find a natural source in the Bush era, echo loudly in our present, though not clearly — if anything, more cacophonously than ever. To Halliday’s credit, she risks adding to the cacophony, speaking past the kind of contemporary identity-politics dogma that prizes the “authentic,” singular “I.” Alice’s section, “Folly,” performs a feminist inversion of misogynist Roth novels such as The Anatomy Lesson, a flip not unlike the one Kamel Daoud makes in The Meursault Investigation (Other Press, 2015), which retells Camus’s The Stranger from the point of view of the character Camus indifferently calls “The Arab.” But with Amar’s section, “Madness,” Halliday discombobulates the whole reclamation paradigm by standing on ground more naturally reclaimed by the likes of Daoud.
These extra layers of provocative questioning would suggest that Asymmetry only really digs in once it leaves Alice’s “folly” behind. But key to the novel’s political provocations, and its literary coherence, is the fact that it never leaves Alice behind. In the book’s very first lines, she expresses contempt for a novel “made up almost exclusively of long paragraphs” with “no quotation marks whatsoever.” Later, she starts “to consider really rather seriously whether a former choirgirl from Massachusetts might be capable of conjuring the consciousness of a Muslim man,” and, at jury duty, she wonders about the absence of a man named Amar Jamali. Tidbits from “Folly” resurface in “Madness”: the music of Leoš Janáček and Chet Baker, quotes from Primo Levi and Stephen Crane, the difficulty of even a not-so-traumatic abortion. We are invited to ask, Did Alice go on to write a short novel that renders the consciousness of a Muslim man in long paragraphs, with no quotation marks whatsoever?
By this smooth metafictional sleight of hand, when Amar remarks, “We all disappear down the rabbit hole now and again,” and, “Sometimes you just want someone else to take over for a while,” Halliday lets us hear Alice thinking and saying and writing his words. His memoir, which abundantly questions whether memoir is anything but another kind of fiction, becomes not only Alice’s novel but also her daring disquisition on the ethics of fiction, be it culturally appropriative or not. And if Amar’s story feels just a bit off — too written and perhaps too well-written, his midair birth too melodramatic — we could understand that to be Alice’s novelistic failing, not Halliday’s, or we could understand it to be an intentional jab at the arbitrariness of what we accept as fiction in a world of outrageous facts and “facts.” Halliday has a keen ear for the chimes of coincidence, and her book surely asks its reader, equally, to consider whether Amar might be a human being in Alice’s universe, rather than a figment of her imagination and research.
In either case, Asymmetry is a remarkably well-modulated novel, drunkenly sober, whimsically somber. It exults in quiet ironies, from Ezra getting his Nobel after all (take that, Phil) to Amar, not Alice, being the one to deliver a first-person autobiography. “Folly” traces a brisk, shapely arc, skipping across a couple years but never losing its vivid immediacy (nor its buoyant, intelligently silly sense of humor, which, yes, slyly recalls Roth). What Halliday sustains more broadly is an exacting control; only very occasionally, mostly in Amar’s section, does this threaten to snuff the life of her language. She has an especially adept feel for pace, and her handling of interpersonal tragicomedy, whether between lovers or between interrogator and detainee, illustrates that timing and tone lie at the core of literary, theatrical, and musical artistry because they lie at the core of social life, not to mention societal citizenship. It’s a relief that the comic tone of “Folly,” which is not above making a recurring gag out of Alice’s dotty neighbor knocking in the rhythm of “Shave and a haircut, two bits,” doesn’t entirely fade from “Madness.” Both sections bring to mind Clive James’s maxim, “A sense of humor is just common sense, dancing.”
James’s line might suggest a celebration of cleverness or one-upmanship. But it has more to do with the bond between wit and wisdom, and with the fact that neither one is worth much without generous sensitivity to other people — you can’t have “common” sense without looking past “I” to “we.” Halliday is onto this, and, if her metafictional deflections and tight rein on the prose betray a certain callow, defensive anxiety, she still generally avoids the kind of cleverness that pats itself on the back. Only in the shorter third section, a transcript of a radio interview with Ezra, does Asymmetry lose its nerve in this regard. Yielding to his indulgent sense of his own wit and wisdom, the book telegraphs through him several tidy takeaways, such as “Our memories are no more reliable than our imaginations” and “Sometimes you just have to let your characters get on with it.” It seems poor service to the other characters not to let them do just that, without giving the solipsistic, famous old white man the last wink and last word. But perhaps even this is a subversive act of generosity. The unlikely chorus to which Halliday has given voice does seem to keep humming underneath, knowing his time will soon be up.
It hardly needs saying that Halliday’s dissonant hum resonates right now, that we (who?) are presently, constantly asking troubling questions about the personal and political asymmetry — and continuity — of disparate lives. Is it politically acceptable for a white, highly educated, upper-middle-class writer to write fiction about an Arab Muslim detainee? Is it politically acceptable — or even aesthetically interesting — for that same privileged writer to write fiction derived from her own personal life, unless she builds in an exhaustively conscientious substructure of self-interrogation?
Halliday manages to honor such pressing questions conscientiously, while also asserting that the identity markers needn’t be all-defining, the substructure needn’t be obtrusive, and the interrogation needn’t be exhausting — or, if exhausting for the writer, at least not for the reader. She has wagered that her debut is challenging enough to get away with being delightful, and that there is value, political as well as literary, not only in the challenge but also in the delight. We should ask whether a writer of lesser privilege or security (immigrant, queer, of color?) could possibly be rewarded, today or tomorrow, by Simon & Schuster or by a broad US readership, for making the same kinds of gambles. But we (who?) should also remember that Halliday is there with us asking the question. Shave and a haircut, two bits: her bets have paid off.
Alec Joyner is a PhD student in English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University.
Join our mailing list to receive news from Full Stop: