Advanced Reader copy - Enjoyed this book, really opened my eyes and made me seek out other similar books to read.

Just perfection. I have the satisfied feeling when you’ve stumbled upon a truly wonderful book. Both innovative in its duel narratives but in that special way that you’re so lost in the story you don’t even notice how masterful the writing is until you finish it and reflect. it feels so true to life you’re fully absorbed.

I didn’t know about Lisa Halliday’s affair with Philip Roth that inspired the first part of the novel, and am glad that I didn’t as I was able to enjoy that section on its own terms. Halliday successfully writes about Alice’s relationship with the much older novelist Ezra Blazer, without it feeling creepy, even as he educates her about literature and buys her things (sounds awful, doesn’t it?). It is, in fact, compelling and fascinating. We learn about Alice’s desire to write towards the end of this section. The switch into Amar’s story happens abruptly and then I was completely drawn in. The final Desert Island Discs section is necessary but less interesting to me, although it reveals connections that may have been missed. It is a playful, clever novel which I found completely engaging.

Not one of my best reads. A book in three parts that didn't seem to link together. Interesting concepts but didn't really work for me

I received an ARC of this novel in exchange for an honest review. Thank you to NetGalley, Granta Books, and the author Lisa Halliday.

I adored this book, and would highly recommend it to all.
So beautifully written that at times it was almost lyrical, and characters and settings so vivid and involving you feel like you are right there, a fly on the wall, as the events unfold.

The three elements to the story were compellingly conceived, and incredibly fascinating. However at times it was difficult to see how they were linked. I enjoy the theory of one of my fellow reviewers that the middle section is Alice's book, which Ezra then references at the end.

Very happy to have discovered this author, and am excited to see what comes next.

This starts with a girl on a bench and a famous author who quickly develop a physical relationship despite the large age gap. What makes this novel stand out are the two main characters – Alice and the famous writer. As I got to know them, their interactions made me smile a lot, particularly the writer’s quick wit. It started meandering towards last third of the novel so I couldn’t tell where it was going to go at that point. I think it was the relationship between Alice and the writer I found most interesting. All in all an enjoyable read from a writer I hope to read more from.

(3.5 stars) I had read a lot about this novel before I started it, which helped. I was mostly interested in the Philip Roth connection: Halliday has been upfront about the fact that she had an affair with the much-older writer when she was a young editor in New York City. So the first section of Asymmetry, titled “Folly,” is clearly based directly on her experiences, shunted onto a naïve character named (Mary) Alice. But the clues as to how to read the second section, titled “Madness,” the story of an Iraqi-American man searching for his brother in his war-torn homeland, are blatant in the first section – if you know to be looking for them – and confirmed in the brief third section.

I truly loved the first section for its own sake, as a picture of innocence versus experience. Ezra Blazer is always trying to educate Alice about literature: pressing the classics on her, and correcting her when she makes embarrassing mistakes, like pronouncing Camus to rhyme with “Seamus,” whereas, as a mistress, Alice has a thing or two to teach the old-fashioned Ezra sexually. And the book as a whole is posing an important question about whether we only trust privileged writers to write about what they know, or allow them to imagine themselves into the experiences of people of another race and/or gender. But I do think there is an issue when the average reader feels shut out by an over-clever connection and has to look to external sources for explanations of what’s going on.

A novel in three parts, linked narratives, or a series of novellas, call it what you will all these descriptions can be used to used to describe Asymmetry, powerful, compelling, interesting.
The first section charts the affair between the twentysomething Alice with an older, established writer, Ezra Blazer. He’s been married, divorced, lauded for his writing. Alice is just beginning her career in publishing and writing – and this imbalance in their lives spills over into a relationship where Ezra tries to control the dynamics. The other imbalance is, of course, in their ages. While Alice has youth on his side and Ezra is becoming “decrepit” he still holds the reigns of power in that he is, quite simply, the more powerful of the two. Still, this remains an important, formative relationship for Alice, and its progression is fascinating to see. A remarkable account of such a relationship. The ending is implicit in the beginning and Halliday reveals traces of it:
“Is this relationship a little bit heartbreaking?”
The glare off the harbor hurt her eyes.
“I don’t think so. Maybe around the edges.”
Observations around the fragility of memory are spot-on, a wry nod, perhaps to the memory of this episode in Alice’s life:
“Plenty of life is memorable only in flashes, if at all. What don’t you remember? I asked. What do I remember? What do you remember of last year? Of 2002? Of 1994? I don’t mean the headlines. We all remember milestones, jobs. The name of your freshman English teacher. Your first kiss. But what did you think, from day to day? What were you conscious of? What did you say? Whom did you run into, on the street or in the gym, and how did these encounters reinforce or interfere with the idea of yourself that you carry around?”

The second piece is a tour-de-force, a sensitively, well-crafted piece about the detention of Amar, an Iraqi-American economist. Nightmarishly, he is en route to Kurdiston when he is detained at Heathrow airport. The account of his detention is gripping – woven through with his thoughts about his life and experiences.

The third piece links back to the first as we read the transcript of an interview the writer Ezra is giving to the BBC about his life and writing, an elderly writer reminiscing on the past, a fitting endpoint to this series of stories.

“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. Checking for seams, trying to figure out how it’s been done. It’s as old as time, this practice of dishing out advice you don’t always follow yourself. “Be audacious in your hieroglyphs, conservative in your hunting and gathering.”

A highly recommended novel about intersecting stories and lives – and how the results of choices cast light and dark over our experiences.

A well-written novel in three parts. The first part about Alice and her older boyfriend reminded me of The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing. I think I enjoyed the second part more - about an Iraqi-American detained at Heathrow.

I really like the first part of this book, the story of a love affair between a young aspiring writer and a much older famous author. However I struggled with the middle part about an American Iraqi held at an airport while trying to visit the UK, I'm still not really sure what story behind this part was. In the final part we return to the famous author on Desert Island discs, again I liked this bit as you could relate this back to the first part of the book..

An examination of the unequal power dynamic between men and women and innocence and experience.

Alice is a publishing assistant who meets the world-famous writer Ezra Blazer on a park bench. Ezra is a much older man who has a weakness for very young women. He sets the rules for their relationship and at times they are pretty bizarre; he summons her by phone when he wants her to come to him and he sings “The party’s over…” when it is time for her to leave. He gives her various presents, including rolls of hundred-dollar bills. He becomes her lover and her mentor but as time passes Alice realises that she cannot develop as an artist as long as she is under his influence. The second section of the book is about Amar, an American on his way to visit his brother in Iraq who is detained in a holding room at Heathrow airport. During his detention he conveys the experiences of growing up as an immigrant in the US, first loves, first jobs and he wrestles with questions of time, memory and identity. The book has a third section which is a radio interview with Ezra.

I found this to be a very difficult book to read and if I was not reading it for review purposes I would not have finished it. It has a very fractured structure and there were many times when I had to return to passages that I had already read to try to understand what was going on. The book has Nobel citations, passages from classic authors and slabs of text from medicine packets and abortion clinic leaflets thrown in at random places and I found that it all made for very disjointed reading.

Saphira

Breakaway Reviewers received a copy of the book to review.

Asymmetry is a novel of three parts. The first is about a young woman named Alice, an aspiring writer, who has a love affair with the literary giant, Ezra Blazer. It’s set in New York. The second is about an Iraqi-American economist, Amar, held by immigration in Heathrow, London in 2008. The third is the transcript of Ezra Blazer’s appearance on the BBC Radio 4 show ‘Desert Island Discs’.

How these three parts sit in symmetry, or not, to each other. How the three main characters lives compare and contrast to each other, encourages us to compare the influence of birth, gender and situation on our ability to choose our path in life. It is also impossible not to try and seek connections between the three parts, to try and understand how these stories relate to each other. We, like Alice, must use our imaginations to create meaning. As Ezra Blazer says, ‘It’s human nature to try to impose order and form on even the most defiantly chaotic and amorphous stuff of life’.

In that final section we are given a clue to one of these connections.

You could think that this makes Asymmetry an overtly literary novel, something intentionally tricksy. While it is full of literary reflection and reference, it is also very easy to fall into the flow of the characters lives; the writing and storytelling is immensely absorbing.

In America much has been made of Lisa Halliday’s affair with Philip Roth and the possible comparisons between her story and the story of Alice and Ezra Blazer. Much like Lisa herself, I’m not really interested in this (see her interview on The New York Times Book Review Podcast). I am however, frustrated by how easily critics and publicists look for the scandalous angle rather than thinking about the other more interesting comparisons to be made between Asymmetry and other novels like Ali Smith’s How to be both and The Living by Anjali Joseph. We are living in a world in which we live asymmetry but only those suffering from the imbalance seem to notice. Thinking of ourselves outside of our cultural, racial, national, religious, sexual boundaries is really important for a development of human consciousness and the survival of our planet – though I’m not sure that the latter was really on Lisa Halliday’s mind.

Asymmetry is a clever and thought-provoking novel. It should be part of a wider conversation about books that sit seemingly different narratives together to inform and challenge our interpretations of the more ‘defiantly chaotic’ nature of our world.

There is certainly asymmetry in the first section of the book, which details an affair between a young female would-be writer, Alice, and a (much) older grand homme of letters, Ezra. (The author, apparently, had an affair with Philip Roth while in her twenties). The man, naturally, has age, status, wealth, privilege on his side, but Lisa Halliday is too astute a writer simply to hand over all the cards to him. Alice may have appeared to have fallen down a rabbit hole, but has been given a lot of agency. “Don’t say sorry, say fuck you,” Ezra instructs her at one point; this comes back to bite him in a devastating way.
In the second section, Amar, an Iraqi-American, is held for twenty-four hours at Heathrow. There’s definite asymmetry here, in his provenance, in his relationship to his bored captors, but it’s not immediately apparent what this section is for. There’s a crying, blonde woman in the detention centre as well. Maybe it’s Alice?
In the third section Ezra, finally in receipt of the Nobel Prize he apparently so richly deserves, appears on Desert Island Discs, flirting outrageously with a wonderfully ventriloquized Kirsty Young. The actual transmission would sadly probably have been much edited, since he goes on at length. I’d love to know what the actual Kirsty Young made of it.
This is an ambitious debut, with much to admire. I’m looking forward to seeing what Lisa Halliday does next.

I really didn't get on with this book. This first section Folly is decent enough, however I felt disconnected from what was going on. The writing feels as if it is glossed with Vanity Fair magazine style sheen, which I personally found off putting. Then maybe this is partly my fault that I did not research the full details of this book, but once the book switched into the second section, I just found the juxtaposition of suddenly focusing on an Iraqi American stuck in airport immigration pretentious and too much a modern literary novel gimmick.

Weird. Is all I can say. I didn't dislike it, but did find it strange. I enjoyed the writing style but the two stories it told, both of which were quite interesting, but it just didn't seem to tie up

I have got about 25% of the way through this books. It is just rubbish there is no storyline, no characterisation hints at sexual activity and describtions of abortion procedures. I cannot on shame even give it one star although for this process i have to

‘Asymmetry’ by Lisa Halliday consists of two seemingly unrelated stories which are eventually revealed to have surprising connections. The first part, ‘Folly’, concerns Alice, an editorial assistant in her twenties living in post 9/11 New York City who begins a relationship with a much older man, a Jewish author named Ezra Blazer who has repeatedly been overlooked for a Nobel Prize for Literature. In the second part, ‘Madness’, an Iraqi-American economist, Amar Jaafari, is on his way to Kurdistan to visit his brother but is detained by immigration officials at Heathrow Airport.

This book grew on me a lot – I didn’t enjoy the first part very much as it came across as rather pretentious and not very original. Halliday herself has said that it is essentially a thinly veiled memoir based on her relationship with Philip Roth when she worked as an editorial assistant in the 1990s and this admission doesn’t help dispel the widely held view that debut novelists are only capable of writing about their own lived experiences. However, the second story is strikingly different, and much wider in scope and setting as Amar reflects on his life on different continents. The shorter third part in which Ezra Blazer is interviewed on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs is very clever indeed – the tone of the interview, specifically the unmistakable voice of Kirsty Young as the unnamed host, is absolutely spot on, and the reader is finally given some possible clues about how the first two parts could be linked. We also get to see Ezra in a slightly different light, rather than from Alice’s perspective.

As the title suggests, the structure is very unbalanced and I suspect the critical reception for Halliday’s debut will be mixed too. The connections between the stories are mostly hinted at rather than made explicit which means ‘Asymmetry’ is frustratingly vague for the most part and I think the full effect of what Halliday achieves here would only be visible after several close readings. For me, the rewards for the reader are all weighted towards the end and will probably come a little too late for those who are less captivated by the beginning, although other readers may have the opposite experience and prefer the first half. However, I think ‘Asymmetry’ is a book that is worth persisting with for those who are prepared for some perplexing literary trickery. The contrast in styles showcases Halliday’s wide range and makes for an impressive debut novel overall in its own unique and disorientating way. Many thanks to Granta for sending me a review copy via NetGalley.

I was given this book by Netgalley for an honest review. Unfortunately I got lost reading the book. I didn’t follow why it moved to the young man and what happened to Alice, the young woman. So I had to give up and have to admit the book was not to my taste.
I am sure their will be other people who find it a literary masterpiece but it did not appeal to this reader.

Clever, complex and well crafted.

4.5 stars

This is a bold, clever debut novel by Lisa Halliday. A story told in three sections which are (allegedly)connected by narrative strands that runs throughout. Finding them is the great challenge and joy of the book (if that’s your type of thing!) Alternatively it could be perceived as two novellas.
The first section and my favourite, ‘Folly’, tells the story of Alice, a young book editor and her relationship with a much older man, Ezra Blazer, a renowned and famous writer. This appears to be semi biographical in that Halliday had an age gap relationship with esteemed novelist Philip Roth. Perhaps a little self indulgent? If you look past this, it is a tender quirky exploration of unlikely love in New York during the early years of the Iraq War. I liked the vibe and very American feel to this section, it may sit better with U.S readers because of the baseball backdrop but can be enjoyed by all.
Asymmetry in its many forms runs throughout this book and can be found in Blazer’s control and dominance in their relationship. It’s a quirky, sometimes sweet relationship but one dominated by the older Brazer. It makes for an interesting device in characterisation. Brazer is intriguing, intelligent and ultimately unlikeable. Alice is initially sweet and naive but begins to find herself by the end of the section and maybe this unhealthy relationship was the catalyst for this to happen.
Alice is the most interesting character of the novel and it was disappointing to say goodbye in the second section that appeared to have zero correlation with the first.
The second section ‘ Madness’ is narrated by Amar, an Iraqi American, due to travel to meet his brother in Kurdistan. He is detained in Heathrow by immigration officers and ‘questioned’ over his dual nationality. While being interviewed Amar’s mind wanders back and forth to his childhood in the Middle East and America and we see the many challenges faced. Where a relationship was used previously to show the asymmetry of power, in this section we see this through the difficulties of immigration and the inequalities of power of different countries.
Interesting tale but I had no idea how this linked with the first story. They seemed absolutely separate novellas. However the final section, cleverly, for the eagle eyed and perceptive, brings it all together. I won’t divulge as this would ruin the ending.
The last section acts as the perfect coda, we revisit Ezra Blazer some years later being interviewed on Desert island discs, in fact the asymmetry is present once again when the interview is abandoned and Ezra dictates and controls how this takes place. Very cleverly and very subtly we are given the reveal and the links become apparent.
While reading the book I wasn’t quite sure I was enjoying the read. It was challenging and confusing, I prefer to read with my heart rather than my head and thought I was trying too hard to create something that probably wasn’t there.
However on completion and some time to think, it was clear that I thoroughly enjoyed this well written, complex, sometimes charming, sometime bleak book. It’s not a straight forward novel and that’s the beauty of it. I was confused by the structure initially but loved it in the end. We have great themes examined like inequality of gender, cultural differences and domination, all coupled with a wealth of literary, political and musical references.
Quite a genre departure for me but massively impressed.

I received an ARC from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

I enjoyed reading this book in varying degrees. I especially liked the first section and the interaction between Ezra and Alice. The second section I found a little more difficult to access, mainly because of the shifting backwards and forwards in time. The third part of the book provided further insight into Ezra’s personality,but did not make him a more sympathetic character. However I struggled to see the link between the three pieces – apart from the obvious link between the first and the last.