A young woman called Alice who works as an editor at a New York City publishing house meets renowned novelist Ezra Blazer in the park and soon begins a May – December romance. Thus begins the first part of Lisa Halliday’s debut novel Asymmetry.
The timing of this story couldn’t be better. Post Weinstein and in the era of #metoo, the author’s exploration of a relationship where the participants are far from equal and where the older, more experienced, richer and more powerful male calls all the shots couldn’t be more prescient. Ms Halliday clearly shows the asymmetry in Ezra and Alice’s relationship as it develops. Ezra calls Alice when he wants to see her. He tells her when to go home. He tells her what to wear, what to read. He makes her keep their relationship secret, introducing her as an assistant when he meets some of his friends.
It’s not all one sided though. Alice learns a lot about life and herself at Ezra’s side and Ezra pays off her college debt and teaches her how to really write although she wonders if she could ever truly lose herself to write from the viewpoint of someone who was different to her in every way.
Ezra’s advanced years bring many health problems and it is only when the author explores this aspect of their lives that the power seems to move in Alice’s favour.
The second part of the book takes us to Heathrow Airport where an Iraqi-American Muslim is detained while trying to pass through en route to visiting his doctor brother in Kurdistan. We are told Amar’s story in flashback and are shown how his family struggled with fitting in to America, a country to different to everything they have known before. Again, the author plays with themes of inequality and the economic, cultural and religious differences not only between America and Iraq, but also between Amar as a westernized Iraqi and the traditions of his family.
The final and shortest part of the book is a transcript of an episode of Desert Island Discs. Kirsty Young, although not named, fairly leaps off the page.
No doubt some of the first part of the book is semi-autobiographical. Halliday had a relationship with Phillip Roth when she worked as an editor in her 20s. I’m not worried that the author will have to mine her personal experiences for further books as part two is totally outwith her direct experience and reads perfectly believably.
Asymmetry is astonishingly good. The more I think about this book, the more I find in it to think about. Definitely a book to stay with me.
I apologise for the poor writing in this review but I’m in the middle of a fibroflare and suffering from good old fibro fog. This book is excellent. Highly recommended.
I received a copy of this book from the publisher via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

I loved the first section of this novel...a quirky, off beat story about the love affair between two Americans: a young woman Alice and a successful writer, Ezra Dexter in his seventies. A relationship usually sensationalized by the tabloids is an exploration of what we mean by love and is handled with humour and sensitivity. Alice wants to be a writer but doesn't know where to start. Ezra talks to her and gives her books to read. This fist section is like a 30s screwball comedy, interwoven with heart breaking pathos.

Then we reach the second section which seems completely unrelated. A Muslim academic travelling to London is held for hours at the airport for questioning and thinks about his life and family. At this point I was confused but went with it.

It's only when we're at the last, shorter section that we see what Lisa Halliday has achieved. We're observing an episode of Desert Island Discs and Ezra is choosing his favourite music. Spoiler alert...we find that Alice has gone on to write her novel - it's the middle section of Asymmetry we've just read.

I wasn't completely convinced by the novel as a whole but each section is enjoyable. And maybe I just didn't get it!

A stimulating book, not one I really enjoyed throughout, but one I’ll remember for sure. Sublimely well written and with a wealth of references to literature, music, politics that I found fascinating (and to baseball, that I found less so), there is much to admire here.

I have little to add to the publishers’ blurb in terms of analysis of instances of the asymmetry of the title. I do wish the blurb hadn’t mentioned the disclosure in the final section of the possible authorship of the middle section. I confess I probably wouldn’t have guessed this otherwise, but since it’s been suggested to me I am now wondering what its significance might be, especially the appearance of the blonde in the black coat towards the end. Maybe I can just be happy that Mary-Alice escapes the slightly creepy relationship in the first section and realises her potential as a writer away from the overwhelming influence of the established, successful, rather manipulative Ezra. Certainly I engaged most with the middle section, with Amar’s character and his family’s story, and that his voice seemed perfectly plausible to me is some achievement from a young American female imagination. What’s more, Lisa Halliday has captured Kirsty Young perfectly, just Ezra’s type but way out of his league (I hope).

really impressive writing - the relationship with Ezra, the older successful man, and Alice, the younger, worshipful girlfriend he takes up with, is utterly familiar and well worked out - the subtle hold he has on het, and the intrusions from outside world that finally make the imbalance seem awkward to her, not 'normal' in her words - is all about the trade off of experiencing the life he has to offer that she cannot achieve probably otherwise. a familiar scenario - part two underscores the feel of the powerless in a far broader landscape of a young man with two unpopular nationalities, pushed around at a border - the good he gains and the awkwardness and imbalance. In the last section returning to Ezra, we witness his capacity to alter balances in his direction again (in fact, in part one, we overhear Alice's boss exclaiming that he'd lost Ezra's new novel ...) so the imbalances extend beyond age differences but more about clout. i kept waiting for something to happen but the experiences of these young people and the life views of the border guards and Ezra, as people in power is insightful and smart. - i was utterly gripped

To me this is three short stories rather than a novel. The pieces are well written and very descriptive. However both are very slow paced. The first story, about the developing relationship between an older, very rich man and a younger woman, does not feel real and is slightly disturbing.
The second part is told in flashbacks while a man is detained in an airport whilst trying to enter the UK. Interesting-ish.
The third part - a fictional transcript of an episode of Desert Island Discs - lost me altogether. This part is supposed to provide a link between the other two but I didn't "get" it.
I don't think I cared enough about any of the characters to examine the story in more detail.

This is a book in three parts exploring imbalances. Unfortunately I chose to give up early on in the second section. I would still say it is an intelligently-written book and I was pulled in by the bizarre start to 'Folly' that saw Alice getting together with a famous, much-older author she barely knew but I really struggled to connect with any of the characters. By the time I got to the second section, I felt that I was having to make a real effort to understand what was going on, sometimes having to go back and reread pages. I wouldn't say it's a bad book, I just couldn't connect with it so didn't have the motivation to keep going. Part of me still wonders how it ends and how (/if) the two characters overlap in the final section, so it's one I might go back to in the future.

I made it about a third of the way through Asymmetry before deciding that life was too short and giving up. I just became thoroughly bored and rather irritated.

It's all very well written, but it had that style-over-substance feel that, frankly, just annoys me. The annoyance isn't as extreme as with Satin Island, for example, which made me want to hunt down the author and give him a good slap, but it has the same sense of a writer implying that the reader needs to be exceptionally clever and knowledgeable to be worthy of reading their brilliant work, while not actually saying anything very insightful or original (or possibly anything at all). There just seems to be page after page of fine writing, convincing dialogue, well-painted background and so on, but which added up to very little as far as I could see.

I also found a distinct air of intellectual snobbery about it. Lengthy, unattributed passages from books appear and then vanish with little clue as to their source (or relevance), or they go to a concert about which we are told nothing in advance and then get, "…she flung up her wrists, flared her nostrils, and the Hammerklavier was sprung from its cage…" Deliberately structuring the narrative like this so that the reader is excluded if they don't recognise cultural references seems to me to have a self-congratulatory tone that I really don't like. I make no claim to be especially cultured; I've read enough Primo Levi to recognise a passage of his, I know and like Beethoven's piano music and so on, but there was plenty here that I didn't know and couldn't place. I'm always very happy to learn more, but I am not willing to be condescended to.

A friend of mine tried to encourage me to continue by saying that she "found Part 1 the hardest to wade through" which, frankly, didn't seem like the strongest of motivations to carry on. It's possible that the later sections would have entranced and delighted me, but having stuck at it as long as I could, I couldn't be bothered to find out. I have given the book two stars rather than one because it is well written, but I'm afraid Asymmetry was definitely not for me.

(My thanks to Granta for an ARC via NetGalley.)

When he first sees her, author Ezra Blazer falls for Alice, a young woman working at a publishing house. Their lives could not be more different, just as the age and the experiences they have. But nevertheless, their love develops slowly and again and again, Alice is astonished by Ezra’s generosity and affection. However, when it comes to his friends, Alice is not presented as his partner; she is just someone he works with, he even invents a new name for her. In Halliday’s second chapter, we meet Amar, a young American of Iraqi origin who is detained at Heathrow Airport and waiting to be released to spend a couple of hours with a friend before boarding anew and travel to his parents’ home country. In the very last chapter, we meet Ezra again, being interviewed and talking about his love for music and women.

Looking at the novel as a whole is simply impossible. The three parts differ so much that I simply cannot talk about them in general. I liked the first part about Alice’s and Ezra’s love most. The way it develops is quite classy, you get to know Ezra as an elderly artist who downright courting Alice, on the one hand, by offering small and large presents and introducing her to his world of art. On the other hand, however, he is not only older but also more powerful, he dictates the rules of their partnership; they are never equals, she is dependent on his kindness and willingness to see her. When he comes up with the ridiculous idea of giving her a new name and resenting her just as a woman he works with but not as a friend, she obviously feels offended, but nonetheless accepts his wish. There is a clear asymmetry in their relationship.

This asymmetry in power is also present in the second part where Amar is fully dependent on the British authorities who seem to act rather arbitrarily. He is kept waiting for hours, never knowing what is going to happen next, if he will ever be granted access to the country or what they accuse him of actually. If he started questioning their procedure, he’d only risk setting them against him and thus reducing his chances of leaving the airport. While waiting, Amar is left alone with his thoughts and memories, memories of long gone love stories, but also memories of Iraq and the war that has been raging there for years and the shifting powers depending on who is in charge.

In the last part, Ezra reappears, now in the role as interviewee. Again, he shows his charms in talking to the young female journalist with whom he flirts openly. Interestingly, she has a plan for the interview but has to give it up and to follow his rules. Another case of asymmetry.

Lisa Halliday really knows how to captivate the reader. Her story is exceptionally well constructed; the fine imbalances are never addressed openly but present throughout the narration. She easily enthralled me and kept me reading on.

Lots of buzz about this book already - is it justified? Um, not really, in my view. Yes, it's clever, and thoughtful, and requires readers to pay attention to details and intertexts (Alice, looking-glasses, the name Amar, for example) but the payoff is less rewarding than I expected. Is it really news that patriarchal power manifests in private, personal relationships as well as public political ones? That storytelling can be a politicised act? That the identity politics of gender, race and religion may overlap? Big and urgent themes, for sure, but I'm not sure what this book has to add to the conversation.

The book it reminded me of most is The Luminaries: the literary game-playing which offers up a surface text beneath which the real work of the book takes place. Smart but a bit heavy-handed - definitely worth a read if only to have an opinion about a buzzy book.

I feel about this book how F R Leavis felt about Daniel Deronda. The middle section was an interesting read, but it didn't add anything to my enjoyment of the story about Mary-Alice and Ezra Blazer.
I think their relationship was sweet, and they both seemed to know it wasn't going to last forever, and enjoyed it for what it was. It avoided the ickiness you sometimes encounter with romances with large age gaps. You get to know Ezra a bit better through the interview section at the end, and understand why Alice found him so charming.

I wanted to like this book, I really did.
But it just did not come together for me. So much so that I speed read through the whole of the 2nd story and had to re-read parts of the third twice because it was convoluted.
Not to my taste at all

There are many things that I liked about Asymmetry the debut novel from Lisa Halliday. Firstly, it is wholly different to anything I have read before – 3 novellas all linked in a way that is only revealed in the final act and it is a powerful and strong piece of writing. These novellas veer from a May to September romance between a young editor, Alice and an acclaimed novelist, Ezra Blazer in the time following 9/11 to the final days of 2008 when an Iraqi-American man is detained at Heathrow and denied entry to the UK. Wide in scope with different and unique prose it is a compelling and page-turning book that I found arresting and unputdownable.

This is a very, very clever book. We are taken straight into the romance between Alice and Ezra – a different, beautiful relationship that despite raising eyebrows is one full of joy. Against a backdrop of a shared love of baseball (which, being a Brit went straight over my head) and a city reeling after 9/11 Ezra and Alice find companionship with one another. I loved how this section, Folly, was written and how the asymmetry in their relationship was explored.

The second novella, Madness, is from the perspective of an Iraqi-American, Amar who is visiting his brother, a Doctor in Iraq, and is travelling from the US to Iraq via a 2 day layover in London. He is detained at Heathrow Airport and is subjected to questioning, medical examinations and hours of time spent in a waiting room. It is in these hours that he looks back at his life, at the paths he has chosen, his family’s history, the asymmetry of being an Iraqi-American (born on a flight between the two countries he holds dual passports) and the horror of war. I think I enjoyed this section the most, it was incredibly human and quite brutal in places but with beautiful prose that made it compelling.

The third act, a coda, is an interview with Ezra Blazer in 2011 and this is where we really get to know him. I can’t say too much about this part of the book but I loved the narrative structure and how everything tied together. Finishing this section made me want to go back and re-read because this is a very multi-layered novel. The style and structure may deter some from it as there is a certain disconnect between the reader and the book – I found it difficult to feel close to or like any of the characters except Amar – but I think that this distance was necessary for the overall themes explored.

Asymmetry is a book that I will return to and re-read. I’m also going to bully encourage my fellow book loving friend, Marie to read it as this is a book that needs a full evening of discussion and dissection – and boy do I love a book that makes me feel like that.

This is a clever book - the problem is, do I want to read a 'clever' book or do I want to have an enjoyable read? I shall say up front I did not like the book. It intrigued me to start with but when I came to the book within a book I began to loose interest, not because the content was not of interest but because of the contrast and the sudden dropping in of a complete change, why was this there at all? Yes, I want a book to make me think, yes I want to feel satisfied after reading a book and a good book will make me think and reflect for some time. So I am not looking for an easy read. I particularly disliked the jumping about timewise, in both the wrapper book and the book within a book. The conclusion is there but I did not enjoy the journey. I think the reviews will be more than usually divided between those who love it and those who don't. Sadly I find myself in the latter and I suspect I shall be in the minority but this is my honest opinion

Interesting structure and the way the author tied the two novella's together was quite clever. But overall, not quite my cup of tea.

One of the challenges of writing a first novel must be to find something worth writing about, and surely the most important thing to write about is life; taking a view on life that somehow manages to gather everything that is important, wonderful, tragic and bewildering about it, the grand and the small, and squeezing it down into a manageable size in a literary format that tries to make some kind of sense of it all. Well, we'd all like to that to be as easy as it sounds, but we know that it's something of a tall order. More often, such efforts turn into sprawling epics that try too hard to take in everything, show off a wealth of knowledge and literature and become a literary experiment entangled in a some kind of complex prose or structural technique. Too often instead of being an all encompassing view of life, such ambitious efforts are myopically reduced to being literary exercises that say more about writing than life. Lisa Halliday's debut novel Asymmetry ambitiously sets out to do all that - and be something of a literary tour de force as well - and manages to do it without letting her novel run away with itself in the style of something like Don DeLillo's Underworld.

Lisa Halliday's Asymmetry certainly doesn't set itself up as being a great novel that aspires to being part of the literature of everything we are and everytihng we know, its slim 288 pages suggesting rather that it has more modest ambitions. It's certainly structured in a simple fashion and written unpretentiously in a light and casual manner, but along the way it draws in all manner of personal life moments, historical events and experiences and manages to tie them into something bigger. In a manner that is becoming more common (see Donal Ryan's recent From a Low and Quiet Sea), the novel is divided into distinct sections with different narrators that appear initially to have not much in common, but are later revealed to be related in a surprising way; a way that opens up and expands their horizons and presents a much wider view of thoughts, ideas and life than you would otherwise think possible to encapsulate into such simple stories.

Asymmetry is divided into three distinct parts; the first 'Folly' is related by Alice or Mary-Alice, a 25 year old editorial assistant for a New York publisher; the second 'Madness' is related by a young Muslim man, Amar Ali Jaafari, born in Iraq but studying Economics in America where he is working on his PhD. The third section 'Ezra Blazer's Desert Island Discs' is as it suggests a transcript of a radio programme where a great Nobel Prize winning American author looks back over his life and the music, and the women, that have been an important part of is life. The third part is most evidently related to the first novella-length section, since it's almost entirely an account of Alice's affair with multiple Pulitzer Prize winning and Nobel Prize in waiting author Ezra Blazer, but there are clues to how the middle novella relates to their story, as well as the implications that this brings to the novel as a whole.

I suppose you could find a young 25 year old editorial assitant's affair with an aging and ailing older man with a serious heart condition somewhat queasy, but there's nothing in Mary-Alice's account that strikes you as being anything more than it is; the love of a young woman for an older man, with neither making any great claims on the other, but both clearly learning and sharing a great deal, despite the differences in age and life experience. There's give and take and nothing is taken for granted. Certainly Halliday's writing, by focussing on the two of them keeping their relationship secret and leaving the rest of the world largely out of the equation, makes it feel much more casual, relaxed and simple. The exchanges are warm and caring, but not without some moments of concern at the folly of what they are doing. And, since one is a writer and the other an aspiring writer, the outside world and their place in it can't be ignored, and it does come into the book mainly in Ezra's sharing of his life experiences and his love for literature and music, but war and history also are inevitably tied into such things.

On the surface then, there would be little to connect Alice's story with Amar Ali Jaafari's account of being detained by UK Immigration on a stop-over before flying on to Istanbul and then onward to visit his brother in Kurdistan in northern Iraq. What after all would a former choirgirl from Massachusetts have in common or with an American Muslim boy whose parents were born in Iraq? While he is interviewed and begins the interminable and inexplicable wait that will determine the outcome of the rest of journey, Amar reflects on his previous visit to Iraq, soon after the American invasion and the fall of Saddam Hussein, where he witnesses the very real feeling on the ground and discusses the impact of the invasion with the people of his home country, and it's a very different view from the narrative that we are given in the west. In some respected then, the two stories are very loosely connected in terms of providing a perspective of East and West, of youthful innocence and the experience of old age and various other supposed polar opposites, and finding that there are common experiences and views, and a whole lot of 'in-between'.

There's a feeling occasionally that Lisa Halliday is trying to take on rather a lot within the confines of a, relatively short debut novel, her targets too wide-ranging and expansive to really settle on any one idea or outlook on the world. Or perhaps the novel is merely pointing out that the world is indeed too filled with disparities to make any simple equivalencies or connections between them. With references to Dickens, Joyce, Camus and Arendt among many other literary, philosophical, historical and musical references, it's surely over-reaching to try and pull them together into something consistent and meaningful. And yet, while I didn't think that the Amar story really held together as a self-contained piece on its own in the way that Alice's story did, in other ways, the disparity between them and the connection that unites them does suggest that this is part of the whole purpose. The seemingly 'flawed' asymmetry is recognised, and it's all part of what makes life - and writing - something magical and capable of revealing something new and unexpected. To get all that into a first novel is quite an achievement.

Assymetry is an intriguing novel, strange but beautiful and very hard to categorise. The first two thirds of the book is the story of Mary Alice, mid-twenties and working for a New York publisher, and Ezra, famous author and Pulitzer Prize-winner and many years her senior. They embark on a slow but encompassing affaire and it takes a long time to reveal just exactly how much older Ezra is.
Lisa Halliday keeps you constantly off-kilter - she writes fluently and the narrative pulls you into Ezra and Alice's world and then suddenly their story snaps shut and you are detained in Heathrow along with a brand new character, Amar, an Iraqi economist.
Amar's story is told in flashback as he is questioned by immigration officials over the course of many hours. It covers his life in America and Iraq throughout two gulf wars and their aftermath. Only at the very end of this novel are the disparate stories fused loosely together and the workings of Ezra's personality explained.
Did I enjoy this book? Surprisingly, yes. Lisa Halliday makes you care about her characters - even the narcissistic Ezra.
Would I recommend it? Not sure .... but it would be a very interesting book to discuss with book group!

I'm sorry to say that I didn't get very far into this book before giving up and wanting to read something else. The writing was absolutely fine, it just wasn't what I was expecting at all. I thought the May-December romance would be intriguing and gentle, but instead it seemed to be a Fifty Shades-esque power dynamic where an old man used his fame, money, age and gender to control the girl and their relationship, with little reciprocity. That wasn't the kind of book I wanted to read.

I appreciate that there was another thread to this novel, which did sound interesting; I just wasn't enjoying it enough to continue.

The title of this novel covers a multitude of themes as well as describing its asymmetrical structure. The first, and longest, story entitled ‘Folly’ focuses on Mary Alice, known as Alice, a bright young woman who works in publishing (so far, so autobiographical) who embarks on a relationship with a much-respected American writer some four decades older than her. Writing in the third person, Lisa Halliday manages to create the intensity of their feelings for each other whilst also undercutting this with an ironic detachment, not least in the choice of this section’s title, which acknowledges Alice’s doubts as to the wisdom of her liaison with Ezra Blazer and his desire to hide what some might see as an abuse of power. Whilst I do admit to rushing through the baseball sections – pretty dull for someone who neither knows nor cares about the game - , Halliday’s depiction of their relationship is funny, touching, and convincing despite the huge age gap. Her use of dialogue is particularly effective.
The middle section of the novel is called ‘Madness’, referring perhaps to the world of the Iraq war and all the crimes committed therein for political or religious reasons. Or maybe it is to remind the reader that the Iraqi-American economist, Amar, held at Heathrow on suspicion of something never spelt out has become maddened by a sense of cultural dislocation. Clearly, the title also links with ‘Folly’; however, it is not until we read in the third section when Ezra Blazer is interviewed by Kirsty Young on ‘Desert island Discs’ and he mentions 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 blind spots in our own ............ a kind of veiled portrait of someone determined to transcend her provenance, her privilege, her naiveté’ that we appreciate exactly why one story follows the other. The Lewis Carroll reference, so clear at the beginning of the whole novel, reinforces this connection.
Loving ‘Desert Island Discs as I do’, I enjoyed Lisa Halliday’s use of this Radio 4 programme in the third section of ‘Asymmetry’, not least because the interview finishes with a proposition which encourages the reader to understand that the author, once lauded as an American great, is now rather a deluded, vain old man whose predilections present him as ridiculous.
I loved this novel. Lisa Halliday not only pays tribute to the influence of writers past through her use of inter-textual references but also tells a story which ponders the effects of asymmetry, good and bad, and reminds us just how powerful fiction can be.

Three stories – well two really, one being told in two parts.

1. A young female editor has a sexual relationship with an eminent, ageing writer. We are told little of the woman other than that we directly observe. What we observe is that she seems rather naive and lonely and does little other than meet with the writer, receiving random (and sometimes slightly strange) gifts, and that she also has occasional interactions with an elderly woman who lives in a separate flat in her building. The relationship with the writer does seem to satisfy her even though he’s prone to passing her off to others as anything but his lover. Their discussions are mainly about literature and baseball. The text is interspersed with extracts from various novels.

2. A young man is stranded at a London Airport whilst en route to meet up with his brother in Kurdistan. He has been picked out by officers from Passport Control and is asked questions about his background and his planned journey. We learn that he intended to stop in London for a couple of days to meet with another man before flying on to his final destination. The traveller is an economist and he holds both an American and an Iraqi passport. In flashback, we get to know more of his life in America and also of his time spend in Iraq.

3. The final section picks up the writer from story 1 again. Some years have passed and this time he’s being interviewed for the BBC radio programme Desert Island Discs. In the course of the interview he makes a clumsy but overt pass at the programmes presenter.

The writing here is to be admired: it’s clever, sad and sometimes funny – but always engaging. Story 2 is written in a very different style to the others, but all three sections grabbed me. We are told that the final story is the coda that unites the first two pieces, but this is far from obvious to me. In thinking back on the stories there are certainly some common themes – insecurity and death, for example – but the onus is very much on the reader to draw these out from the text. When I came to the end I was temporarily at a loss: what had I just read and what did it all mean? In truth, I’m still not sure I’ve worked it out.

Lisa Halliday's novel of three parts charts the relationship between an eccentric older writer Ezra Blazer, his young lover Alice, and then moves quickly to the story of an American Iraqi attempting to find his roots.

Individually, each story is captivating, Halliday's ability to bring humour with subtle behaviour is remarkable. Similarly, her research into Iraq is interesting - though at one point I did get confused as she mentions the Clinton administration's foreign policy role during the second Gulf War when it should be under George Bush. I'm unsure whether this is a typo or a genuine mistake or I'm wrong altogether.

While each part is well-written, and the first story is completed in the third part when Ezra's character becomes a guest on BBC's Desert Island Discs, it all feels rather disjointed. Perhaps this is why the novel is named Asymmetry as a result? We may never know.