Two novellas set in different countries with apparently unrelated characters – plus an ingenious tailpiece. There is a connection, but you need to be on the qui vive to see it coming.

Asymmetry, as the title implies, is a novel about life’s lack of symmetry. A young woman has an affair with a man considerably older than herself. He is a rich, successful, world-famous writer, she a lowly editorial assistant. His health is failing. He is needy and lonely. She is grateful and acquiescent. They bond over a mutual passion for baseball.

An Iraqi-American economist is detained at Heathrow Airport on suspicion of… what exactly? We are never quite sure, but we can hazard a guess. Prior to his passport being seized, his intention had been to spend a couple of nights in London before flying out to visit his brother in Kurdistan. During his interminable wait for immigration officers to make enquiries, fill out forms and return to him with a decision, we are privy to his innermost thoughts as he relives his past and recalls events from the Iraq War.

Granta Books acquired the UK and Commonwealth rights to Asymmetry in a seven-way auction in 2016. The editorial director, Bella Lacey, has described the author as an “exceptional new American writer” and the book’s release on 1st March 2018 as “a major publishing event” – and yes, it’s quite true that the novel has generated excitement in literary circles. But why?

The Milan-based author, Lisa Halliday has written a startling début about power-play, in which literary and musical references abound. The characters are believable and likeable misfits, and the dialogue sharp and frequently amusing. I enjoyed the first part of the book, entitled Folly, far more than the second (II Madness), for its droll wordplay and New York-Jewish humour, although there were times when I found the pernickety Pulitzer Prize-winning Ezra Blazer extremely irritating and so wished Alice would be more assertive.

Asymmetry is a story in which nothing and nobody is equal. It is inventive, compelling and altogether unforgettable. We should expect to hear a great deal more of its promising author over the coming months.

If I am honest, it took me a few pages to get properly into this book, but I am very glad I did because it develops into a fascinating book that is almost more enjoyable on reflection than it is during reading. I think I’ve spent almost as long pondering it as I spent reading it.

The book consists of two novellas followed by a coda. At first sight, the novellas are very different from one another. One tells the story of Alice who works for a New York publisher and wants to be a writer who meets the multi-award winning author Ezra Blazer. Despite decades between their ages, they begin an affair. The second novella switches from third person to first person and tells us the story of Amar who is travelling from the US to Iraq to visit his brother. On a planned stopover at London, he is held back and questioned by immigration officials. This story develops by mixing Amar's reaction to the questioning and flashbacks to his family life.

On the face of it, there aren’t many obvious connections between these two stories.

The coda returns us to Ezra who is now not just a Pulitzer Prize winner, but also a Nobel laureate and is being interviewed for the renowned Desert Island Discs radio show. In the course of the interview, he says something that makes the reader stop and look back at the two novellas.

The greatest fun to be had with the book is to then spend an age wondering whether the connections you have made are the right ones. The book blurb makes it clear that the book is about the asymmetry (imbalances) found in many human relationships: inequities in age, power, talent, wealth, fame, geography, and justice. But the comment from Ezra in his interview suggests it is also about how story-telling (fiction) can help explore these imbalances. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote that ”fiction reveals truth that reality obscures (if I had a book blog, I would call it Obscured By Reality, but someone has already grabbed that name!), and, I think, this book is partly about how it can do that.

I say “greatest fun”, but that’s just a personal view. I’m not suggesting that the book is poor in any way. I enjoyed both novellas. Perhaps the second was more my taste in style, but then the coda suggests that the differences in style may be deliberate, which, in turn, makes the first one more enjoyable on reflection.

The book will be published early in 2018 and it will be fascinating to discuss it with other readers when it is fully available. I’m not 100% convinced I’ve got the connections right, so I’m keen to explore that with other people.

My thanks to Granta Press for an advance copy sent via NetGalley.

Asymmetry is the debut novel of Lisa Halliday.

The book consists of two novellas and coda. The first novella, set in the early 2000s tells the story of Alice – both the opening and closing of this novella, make it clear that the characters name is a very explicit nod to the Alice of Lewis Carroll. An aspiring writer, working at a publisher in New York she bumps into the famous, multiple Pulitzer Prize winning now elderly writer Ezra Blaze – and the two commence an unlikely affair which Alice herself admits could easily be seen as “a healthy young woman losing time with a decrepit old man”. This section is written very much in the great American novel style of a male novelist, with for a non-US reader far too much baseball – but with interesting vignettes, laced with classic litetary excerpts (Twain, Camus, Genet, Miller, Joyce, Dickens, Levi) with music-hall song lyrics and with the citations for the winners of the Nobel Prize for literature during the time period (2002-2004). The story finishes with Alice waiting for jury service and the increasingly frail Ezra in hospital.

The second novella is a distinct change of tone and character and even person (from third to first). Amar is a US based Iraqi-American dual national, in 2008 on his way to visit his brother who to their parent’s dismay decided to live back in Iraq as a Doctor, he attempts to stop over in London and stay with war journalist friend. The story is set in an immigration holding room at Heathrow, and between questioning by immigration officials, Amar reflects back on his life and the different paths it could have taken, including the hazardous life of his Iraqi based relatives (including his brother) and the increasing threat of kidnap and ransom demands.

The two stories at first only seem subtly and at most tangentially linked.
The coda is a recording of Desert Island Discs in 2011 – where the guest is a garralous, now Nobel-laureate Ezra – he tells (or possibly embellishes) his life story while discussing his records, and attempting to seduce Sue Lawley – but one comment sheds a completely different light on the relationship between the two novellas and on the whole novel.

The novel itself then becomes one with two different themes – firstly inequalities or assymetries (in age, wealth, fame, geography, nationality, official and legal status) and secondly the role of fiction in examining and exploring these asymmetries.

Overall this was a book that I enjoyed much more after I finished and reflected on it than when I was reading it – perhaps not least due to my complete lack of identification with the baseball references, or the bizarre relationship, in the first section. By contrast, the second section, where the author is clearly writing about cultures, peoples and circumstances of which she has no knowledge and where the narrator himself comments “It may perhaps be said – if anyone dared – that the most worthless literature of the world has been that which has been written by the men of one nation concerning the men of the other” – I found much more enjoyable and convincing. After reading the coda I realised that much of this may be completely deliberate and all part of the meta-fictional conceit.

Overall this is a book I would like to return to after its official publication – both to read interviews with the author and to discuss the book with other readers.

My thanks to Granta Press for an ARC via NetGalley.