Asymmetry

“I know what you do when you're alone.”
“What?”
“You're writing, aren't you?”
Alice shrugged. “A little.”
“Do you write about this? About us?”
“No.”
“Is that true?”
Alice shook her head hopelessly. “It's impossible.”

I knew something about Asymmetry before I started it – something about it having been written in two seemingly unrelated parts that are pulled together by a concluding section – but it's only “seemingly unrelated” if you're not really paying attention (but, was I paying attention just because I knew to look for “something”?) I understand now that there's something autobiographical in this book for author Lisa Halliday, and as it is a book about writers, it all gets very clever and meta – and according to critics, if I thought sections weren't particularly well written, well that's all part of the metafictive strategy – and while I really do like novels that stretch the form into interesting places, this just all felt so deliberate. I get that's the point, but I don't have to love it. Spoilers beyond here.

Alice is a young (twenty-something but looks sixteen) assistant-editor-but-wants-to-write-someday transplant to Manhattan when she begins a relationship with an older, famous novelist (as was Halliday's own experience with Philip Roth). There's a lot of Alice in Wonderland imagery (Ezra is always handing Alice things to eat and drink; so many mirrors) and has that same wide-eyed, “Golly, what will happen next?” feeling of powerless drifting. You get the sense that Alice feels affection for the older man, but it's not a fulfilling sexual relationship (due to his “decrepitude”), she's not allowed to contact him or stay overnight at his apartment in the beginning, and she seems just as happy to be sent on an errand to pick up his favourite applesauce as she is to let him pay off her student loans. Meanwhile, Alice is initially naive, soaking up Ezra's lessons on life and culture, and the tone of this section is light and unliterary: at one point the narration notes that in order not to miss a call from Ezra, Alice carried her phone everywhere with her, “to the kitchen when she got herself a drink, to the bathroom when she went to the bathroom”. And I liked that line – it made me sit up and note that a deliberately bad line was put in to tell me something about this section; it reads a bit like an adolescent's diary. Near the end of this section (and to conclude the conversation I opened with), Alice tells Ezra that she'd like to write about war, dictatorships, world affairs; maybe even that Muslim hot dog seller they were just talking to:

For her part, Alice was starting to consider really rather seriously whether a former choirgirl from Massachusetts might be capable of conjuring the consciousness of a Muslim man.

That first section eventually ends without any resolution to Alice and Ezra's relationship of a few years, and then we are at Heathrow Airport, inside the consciousness of a Muslim man. Amar, having been born in American airspace while his Iraqi parents were emigrating, holds dual citizenship; and it being 2008, his two passports are cause for suspicion as he's trying to clear Customs. As Amar – an economist who only wants to spend a two day layover in London with an old friend before continuing his trip to Iraq to visit family – waits in a holding area, the narrative rotates between an overview of his life and his present-day interactions with the bureaucratic machine; much is said about war and dictatorships and world affairs; Amar's power relationship with the British agents is just as asymmetrical as Alice's had been with Ezra Blazer. The tone in this section is much more mature and literary, and in case I didn't catch that line about the hot dog seller, Halliday (or is that Alice?) briefly inserts herself:

This is how I felt. But in the mirror on the other side of Sami's new piano I didn't look like a man teeming with so much potential. On the contrary, in my eleven-year-old jeans, a week's worth of stubble, and a fraying windbreaker from the Gap, I looked rather more like the embodiment of a line I would later read – something about the metaphysical claustrophobia and bleak fate of always being one person. A problem, I suppose, that is entirely up to our imaginations to solve. But then even someone who imagines for a living is forever bound by the ultimate constraint: she can hold her mirror up to whatever subject she chooses, at whatever angle she likes – she can even hold it at such that she herself remains outside its frame, the better to de-narcissize the view – but there's no getting around the fact that she's always the one holding the mirror. And just because you can't see yourself in a reflection doesn't mean no one can.

The final section is a transcript of the present-day Ezra Blazer being interviewed on the BBC Radio program, Desert Island Discs. In the interview, he explains the inanity of trying to separate “truth” from “fiction” in a novelist's work, he cuts himself off as he starts to talk about his “young friend who has written a rather surprising little novel 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 blindspots in our own”, and in a progressively creepy manner, Ezra hits on the female interviewer, eventually using the same pickup line on her that had worked on Alice in the beginning. And I guess that's the point at which the asymmetry is balanced: when the mature Halliday has the platform and the skills to expose Roth for the horny old goat that he was.

There was no surprise to that “reveal” in the final section for me – how else could the first two sections have been linked? – so I didn't find it necessary (beyond the poisoned pen aspects, I suppose). And while I get the purpose of the contrasting tones in the first two sections, I don't buy that any flaws in the part about Amar can be attributed to Alice instead of Halliday. Like I said, I like the idea of an author trying something inventive like this, but the results were just okay.