Asymmetry

Lisa Halliday

Granta, £14.99

Review by Nick Major

What makes a novel cohere? In Lisa Halliday’s bold debut, an elderly writer called Ezra Blazer tells his young lover, Alice, to remember Chekhov’s principle, “‘If there’s a gun hanging on the wall in the first chapter, in a later chapter it must go off.’” Alice responds with a witty jab, “‘If there’s a defibrillator hanging on the wall in the first chapter, in a later chapter it must go off?’” At the end of Folly, the first part of Asymmetry, Ezra is taken to the hospital with severe chest pains. It’s a tender and comic scene, but it also serves an obvious purpose. Up to this point, narrative cohesion has been maintained. Halliday’s prose style has not deviated from its sharp, manicured beginnings, the rhythm has retained a fresh vitality and not missed a beat, the playful tone has not erred, and these two white New Yorkers have gone about their romantic “misadventure” in an utterly convincing way.

Then Part II, appositely entitled Madness, jettisons all this and strikes out anew. There is an abrupt shift in register and perspective. Without warning, a Kurdish-American economist called Amar Jaafari starts telling us his life story. Why? Well, he has time. He is being detained by British airport security on his way to visit his brother in Iraq in the wake of the British-American invasion in 2003. His thoughts are philosophically complex, dipping in and out of medicine, faith, determinism and free will, war and love. This stylistic about-face goes on for a good one hundred pages. It is a fine and nuanced story, not without its own Chekhovian Gun moment.

In a conventional realist novel, we might expect Amar and Alice’s lives to intersect, if only briefly. And if that does not happen, we might expect Part III, a transcript of Ezra Blazer’s interview on Desert Island Discs, to provide some formal resolution to the two preceding stories. But, Asymmetry does mostly what it says on the dust jacket. A warning to the uninitiated: don’t spend too long hunting for missing pieces of the puzzle. You will only end-up with a few hints and elusive signs.

For example, in Part III, Ezra tells us that a young female “friend” of his has written a novel. During their earlier romance, Alice goes through the normal neophyte writer’s anxieties: “Was she even capable of being alone for as long as it took? Would it make her life any less inconsequential than it was now? And, hadn’t he [Ezra] already said everything she wanted to say?” This last question is especially pertinent for a writer trying to find their voice. Finally, at one point during Folly “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.” The oblique inferences all suggest that Madness and even Folly could both be short novels written by Alice.

In a recent interview, Halliday said that Ezra is a veiled portrait of Philip Roth, with whom she had a romantic relationship in her twenties. Even without Halliday’s admission, it wouldn’t be hard to make this connection: Ezra is a Jewish American who has won every literary prize going except the Nobel (there is a running gag about this all through Part 1), writes metafiction, lives in Manhattan but has a country retreat, is a baseball fan, suffers from chronic back pain and has a certain sexual playfulness about him. He - and therefore Halliday - is also vibrantly funny. On the cab drive to the hospital during Ezra’s ticker tantrum, the cab driver breaks suddenly. “When they’d recovered from the jolt, Ezra leaned forward politely while Alice righted his cane. ‘Excuse me, sir! Would you mind slowing down a little please? I’d like to get to the hospital and then die.’”

But, as Ezra says, let’s not get too caught up distinguishing truth from fiction. Given Halliday’s sense of humour, she’s probably in hysterics at critics trying to solve the mystery of a novel called Asymmetry. I have certainly spent a long time wondering about it. In the end, I settled on reading it with a pair of bi-focals on. In “Folly”, the 2003 invasion of Iraq is background static; in “Madness” the focus shifts, and the war is brought into the foreground. Then again, one of Halliday’s epigraphs is from The Annotated Alice: “we all live slapstick lives, under an inexplicable sentence of death.” Perhaps, Halliday is simply taking us down a rabbit hole. Whatever’s going on, it’s a fabulous mind-bending trip.