"Asymmetry" by Lisa Halliday (Granta, 2018)

"Folly" - A seemingly naive young woman, Mary-Alice, who doesn't explicitly think through things, has a casual relationship with a much older man, Erza, a novelist, a Nobel-hopeful. She wants to be a writer in Europe. They shared an interest in baseball and old songs. He has a heart condition and is generous with money. He's being propositioned by the publishing company she works for. Not much happens in this first section, though there are some witty touches and similes -

• When the storm retreated, what was left of it counted out the early-morning minutes in slow, metronomic drips (p.19)
• [a grand piano] large enough to be a baby giraffe's coffin (p.77)

On p.75 we begin to see her problems - "Could all the rural quietude on earth cure the anxiety of self-doubt? 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?". By p.78 "the music made her more desperate than ever to do, invent, create - to channel all her own enegies into the making of something beautiful and unique to herself - but it also made her want to love"

On p.91 they begin to fall out. At the end she, with some regret, wants to end it. He doesn't.

"Madness - Amar is battling through Heathrow passport checks, having arrived from LA and soon leaving for Iraq via Istanbul. He's an economist. He was born on a plane over the States. He has dual nationality. When younger he found that committing thoughts onto paper in a journal didn't help him understand things. He's aware that memory is unreliable. He's articulate -

• she was beautiful in the way some girls are beautiful despite have bypassed pretty entirely (p.170)
• Acting organised her. It sorted her out. Like a laned highway, it regulated her speeds and, for the most part, prevented her emotions from colliding (p,176)
• Everyone - irreligious people included - relies on irreducible answers every day. All religion really does is to be honest about this, by giving the reliance a specific name: faith

His brother Sami returned to Iraq and unlike him lives for the moment. During a stay in London he met Alastair, who had stories to tell about Grozny. He listens to Desert Island Discs. During a late visit to Iraq, visiting the hospital where Sami worked, he bumped into Alastair again. In the end his not allowed into the UK. He has to stay in the airport until he flies to Turkey.

In this section, some details from the first section re-appear - a facial birthmark, Bob Monkhouse, morning after pills, etc. There are verbatim dialogues, and overheard phone-calls.

"Erza Blazer's Desert Island Discs": A short concluding section in interview format. It's 2011. Erza's won the Nobel. He says that "Our memories are no more reliable than our imagination". He says that in his early work he contrived to make characters meet so that could explain things to each other. Later his characters got on with their own lives. If paths crossed, fine. If not, that's interesting too. He talks about a young friend of his who's written a 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 blind spots in our own. It's a novel that on the surface would seem to have nothing to do with its author". He has children (twin) in France who he didn't know about until they were adult. His choice of book is "Ulysses". He says "We have very little choice other than to spend our waking hours trying to sort out and make sense of the perrennial pandemonium. To forge patterns and proportions where they don't actually exist. and it is this same urge, this mania to tame and possess - this necessary folly - that sparks and sustains love". He ends by asking the interviewer out.

In the 2+ pages of acknowledgments there are the sources of extracts from Mark Twain, Genet, Camus, Henry Miller, Joyce, Dickens, Arendt, Primo Levi, and many lyricists.

Other reviews

• Katy Waldman (“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.)
• Justine Jordan (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 ... 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.)
• Ayten Tartici (Asymmetry has an unusual tripartite structure. ... Contrary to expectation, Alice’s and Amar’s universes never overlap, save for the shared time and space of the first Bush administration. First-time readers of Asymmetry will be forgiven for fretting that Halliday is risking aesthetic incoherence in chasing these completely different narrative threads, and yet the careful reader soon begins to notice how a series of details in “Folly” are repeated in “Madness.” ... Many pages into Amar’s story, the reader finally begins to suspect that Amar’s narrative is actually Alice’s creation ... The novel does not confirm Amar as a product of Alice’s imagination until the end ... Alice’s declaration that it is pointless to write “a book that does not have any quotation marks” also reflects the novel’s own rich sense of intertextuality. In addition to that paraphrase of Alice in Wonderland, full paragraphs of Mark Twain, Jean Genet, Albert Camus, and Hannah Arendt, all of whom Alice is reading, are frequently reproduced verbatim, while other, stylistic influences from Lewis Carroll and many structural allusions to characters and sequences in Roth’s oeuvre also appear. ... The word asymmetry itself appears only once in the novel, buried in Amar’s story in “Madness.” Amar and his father are looking for a foreign-exchange shop in Sulaymaniyah, but they have difficulty reading the signs, which are in Arabic rather than Kurdish. Even though Kurdish is written in Arabic letters in Iraq, Amar notes, “The word for bank is the same, but the word for money changer is not, and while I have never learned the etymology behind this minor asymmetry I can imagine it represents centuries of cultural and ideological dissidence.” [] Halliday’s sensitivity to this “minor” asymmetry, a subtle semantic distinction between two languages that share a common alphabet, neither of which is her own, bespeaks the ambition of Asymmetry’s attempt to capture the workings of another’s mind.)
• Parul Sehgal (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. ... 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.)
• Sean Hewitt
• Kirkus Reviews (“Death is the dark backing a mirror needs if we are to see anything,” says Amar as he’s detained, quoting Bellow.)