Flirting with Time: a Review of Asymmetry

Font Size: A A A Flirting with Time Ruth Margalit JUNE 7, 2018 ISSUE Asymmetry by Lisa Halliday Simon and Schuster, 275 pp., $26.00 Early in Asymmetry, Lisa Halliday’s astounding first novel, Alice, a young assistant editor at a large publishing house, comes across a stray paper in the apartment of the much older writer she is sleeping with. On it are a few typed lines, including this: “An artist, I think, is nothing but a powerful memory that can move itself through certain experiences sideways…” The quote bears no attribution, but it comes from the nineteenth-century novelist Stephen Crane. It will resurface, as so many other details in Alice’s story, in Asymmetry’s second section, a seemingly disconnected tale told from the point of view of an Iraqi-American economist detained at Heathrow Airport. It is also an apt précis for what Halliday sets out to achieve in her deceptively smart novel. Deceptive because, though it tells two relatively straightforward stories—one a coming-of-age love story; the other the tale of an uprooted man searching for his lost brother—it does so while breaking away from the conventions of realist fiction. Halliday relies instead on omissions and inferences. She arranges the first section of the Lisa Halliday; drawing by Siegfried Woldhek novel (titled “Folly”) into short, associative bursts reminiscent of Renata Adler’s Speedboat (1976) or, more recently, of Jenny Offill’s Dept. of Speculation (2014). And she interlays her book with various texts, from Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963) to an abortion manual, ending it with an inspired set piece that reads like a spot-on transcript of a BBC Radio 4 program. But I’m afraid the above description risks making Asymmetry appear heavy-handed or pretentious. It is anything but. In fact, one of its many pleasures lies in its adherence to the classical novelistic tradition of a forward-moving story (two, in this case) well told. Halliday’s impressively assured yet light touch moves through the novel sideways, which is to say porously and without judgment. When we first meet Alice, she is sitting on a bench on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, reading a book: She was considering (somewhat foolishly, for she was not very good at finishing things) whether one day she might even write a book herself, when a man with pewter-colored curls and an ice-cream cone from the Mister Softee on the corner sat down beside her. She recognizes him instantly, and so do the joggers bobbing by. He is Ezra Blazer, a writer Halliday consciously modeled on Philip Roth, in order, she said in an interview, to “maximize the ‘anxiety of influence.’” (And perhaps out of familiarity: Halliday had a relationship with Roth when she, like Alice, was in her twenties and working in book publishing, and the two have since remained friends.) His influence is great indeed, for Alice is an aspiring writer, though as yet unhatched. She certainly has the eye of one—noticing the way in which cars driving in the rain appear to be traveling faster than when it’s dry; how a photo Ezra had taken of her “was almost a beautiful photograph,” but the problem “was its Aliceness: that stubbornly juvenile quality that on film never failed to surprise and annoy her”; or the fleeting look of irritation that crosses Blazer’s face when he catches sight of the “white cone of discarded typescript” lining his wastebasket. But the unspoken understanding between them is that Alice’s ambition, so far as it exists, must remain secondary to Blazer’s work. One of the novel’s asymmetries is the inherent power imbalance between an impressionable young woman and a successful older man. (I may be complicit here, too, instinctively referring to her by her first name and to him by his last.) Blazer determines where and when they will meet—his apartment, after his writing day is done—and for how long. Whenever he wants Alice gone, all he has to do is sing “The party’s over…” and she staggers home, “her belly full of bourbon and chocolate and her underwear in her pocket.” At the start of their relationship, Alice jots down her phone number on a bookmark and hands it to him. Blazer tells her, “You’ve lost your place.” We suspect he’ll turn out to be right in more ways than one. The imbalance quickly turns financial. Alice lives without an air conditioner, so Blazer buys her one, showering her with other gifts as well—a “sensible” watch, a Chanel eau de parfum, a luxurious Searle coat that makes her feel “pampered and invincible.” This is done not so much in the possessive manner of a high-roller toward his trophy wife (though there is an aspect of that, of course) as in the benevolent spirit of an older uncle, say, besotted with a precocious niece. Along with the presents, Alice also gets an education. “It’s Ca-MOO, sweetheart. He’s French,” Blazer tells her. When he sees her reading a biography of Hitler, he advises her to steer clear of sentimental accounts of the Holocaust and to focus instead on Primo Levi, Gitta Sereny, and Arendt. By the by, he offers her encouragement of sorts, saying that her conspiracy-theorist father is a writerly “gift” and that she should write what she knows. “Don’t worry about importance,” he advises. “Importance comes from doing it well.” Books—and a passion for baseball—are what unite them, and Halliday is clearly having fun conjuring the strange ins and outs of a business in which Blazer is the undisputed deity and Alice a mere mortal. Time in the novel is marked by a running gag about Blazer missing out on the Nobel each year. There’s a stinging moment in which Alice finds, tossed away, the galleys of a novel by someone she knows, with a letter asking Blazer for a blurb “still paper-clipped to its cover.” There’s a funny aside about her firing off an e-mail at work “rejecting another novel written in the second person.” And some wonky inside baseball, too. When Alice visits Blazer’s summer home and tells him that she just killed “the biggest wasp,” he can’t help himself: “I thought George Plimpton was the biggest wasp,” he says. At first glance, theirs is a familiar story—of docent and pupil, artist and muse. But the Alice–Blazer arc doesn’t read as a cautionary tale about the pitfalls of gender, sex, and power. It is—as life is—more complicated than that. On the one hand, we get to inhabit Alice’s perspective, so that her role as muse is nicely subverted. On the other hand, she remains elusive, kept by Halliday at a third-person remove. And while we sense that Alice and Blazer are wrong for each other—“for a moment Alice saw what she supposed other people would see: a healthy young woman losing time with a decrepit old man”—there is, nonetheless, a tenderness between them that is absent from Alice’s interactions with more “suitable” young men. (In one short but skewering sketch we learn of a boy she has sex with once: he is an assistant in the Sub-Rights Department; they meet at a “retirement thing” for a company editor; in the morning he puts on his corduroys and bolts. Enough said.) Meanwhile, Alice and Blazer’s relationship, lopsided as it is, starts to tilt the other way, with Blazer becoming increasingly dependent on Alice to run errands for him after he undergoes an unsuccessful back operation, and to inject a dose of liveliness into his veins. “While they were doing one of the things he wasn’t supposed to do” begins a typical encounter between them. The more time they spend together, the more daunting his influence: “Ninety-seven years they’d lived between them, and the longer it went on the more she confused his for her own.” They use a fine scrim of humor to veil and unveil their age difference. Alice tells Blazer of a dresser she bought with the money he gave her—a “vintage 1930s piece,” she says. “Like me,” he replies. Nor is she herself above ribbing the multiple-Pulitzer-Prize-winning author. When he inquires after her family, asking if her grandmother is still alive, she says: “Yep. Would you like her number? You’re about the same age.” Contrary to Blazer’s advice, however, Alice isn’t interested in writing what she knows. She is drawn to conflict and world affairs—“Writing about myself doesn’t seem important enough,” she tells him. He reads Keats in bed; she reads about the latest London Tube bombings. She also pores over Jon Lee Anderson’s The Fall of Baghdad, at one point wondering whether “a former choirgirl from Massachusetts might be capable of conjuring the consciousness of a Muslim man.” (The second section of the novel will serve as a kind of answer to that question.) Still, when the United States invades Iraq, the war touches their lives only tangentially. They share a praline tart as President Bush announces the invasion on television. This is war as seen from the comfortable confines of 85th and Broadway. Not so with the second part of the novel (entitled “Madness”), in which the currents of war soak every corner of human experience. The characters in this section are not on the front line—they live in Los Angeles, Brooklyn, and Iraqi Kurdistan (a relative bastion of peace compared to the rest of Iraq)—and yet their lives are hemmed in by events larger than themselves.

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