Folly and Madness

Asymmetry a novel by Lisa Halliday.  Simon and Schuster.  271 pp. $16.00.  *****

Asymmetry is a first novel that reads like the work of an old hand.  Lisa Halliday has worked as an editor and agent, and an Internet bio mentions the fact that she published one story, in 2005, but it’s hard to believe she hasn’t been writing for years, so polished and accomplished is her prose.  The book has been notorious because the first half—entitled “Folly”—recounts an affair between a young woman and a much older famous author by the name of Ezra Blazer, and Halliday is known to have had an affair with Philip Roth when she worked for his literary agency.  In fact—I almost wish I weren’t saying this, it seems so weird—her prose is positively Rothian.  It’s almost more Philip Roth than Philip Roth.  I don’t see how having a love affair could produce such a result (I’m sure other women who had affairs with Roth don’t write well at all), but there it is.

The second half of the novel is about another subject altogether, an Iraqi-American who is detained in Heathrow airport because the logistics of his trip are suspicious, and in a coda to the entire book—a long interview with Ezra Blazer that comes at the end—Blazer says the following in a kind of aside.  “A young friend of mine has written 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.  It’s a novel that on the surface would seem to have nothing to do with its author, but in fact is a kind of veiled portrait of someone determined to transcend her provenance, her privilege, her naivete.”  That is a perfect description of the second half of Asymmetry.  In the first half Halliday was writing about something close to her own experience.  In the second half she was getting as far from that as possible.

The thing that seems loaded about “Folly” is that Roth has been excoriated by any number of women for the portrayal of women in his books, for the fact that they are often just seen and used as sex objects (see Portnoy’s Complaint, for starters), and that he was known as a sexual predator.  How to portray a relationship with such a person, between him and a woman forty years his junior, in the year 2018?

The Alice of this story does not work at the agency where Blazer is a client.  He actually picks her up on the street, in a scene that is eerily reminiscent for me of a scene in one of Roth’s own novels, Everyman.  I remember at the time thinking it was preposterous that a man that age would imagine he had any appeal to a woman so much younger, no matter how famous he was.  But in Asymmetry Alice immediately knows who this man is, she knows what he’s doing, and—for whatever reason—she’s interested.  They gradually develop a relationship, which becomes romantic and sexual and increasingly important to both of them.  The late-sixtyish novelist as he is portrayed in the book is not a sexual predator or (as we used to say) a male chauvinist pig.  He is attentive and thoughtful to his young girlfriend, the soul of courtesy and kindness.  If there is anything obnoxious about his behavior, it is that he is slightly too condescending and pedagogical, giving her a reading list and recommending various cultural events (she, for her part, seems a little too uneducated and naïve to be believable.  She apparently hasn’t read Huckleberry Finn.  She doesn’t know how to pronounce Camus).

Alice seems appreciative of everything.  At first Blazer keeps her at a certain distance, periodically retreating from his New York apartment to a house on Long Island where he works more intensely, but as time goes on her brings her into that part of his life, and gradually they both seem to relax (they had both been reluctant) about being seen as a couple.  There is an obvious asymmetry to the relationship—in terms of age, wealth, power, fame, any number of things—but none of that seems an issue for Alice, at least not that we see (I for one wondered what it must be like for a woman with a young beautiful body to be with a man who not only wasn’t beautiful, but had a wide variety of physical ailments, as Roth himself did).  It is only once health care becomes a major issue—it’s as if she’s looking after her grandfather—that these things become a strain.

The second section, “Madness,” is a complete and abrupt departure.  Amar Jaafari has been detained in an airport—understandably, I would say—because the trip he is taking is so unusual that it seems suspicious.  Scenes of his encountering the airport bureaucracy alternate with a brief but detailed account of his life, and I’ll have to admit that, on my first reading, I was so focused on what happened in the airport that I skimmed over the other sections too quickly.  I eventually realized they were the heart of the story, and read the whole section again.  It is, as Blazer suggests in that interview, a remarkable tour de force.  In the novel’s first half we assume—perhaps wrongly—that Halliday is recounting an experience she actually had.  In the second half she’s imagining a life completely different from her own.

The asymmetry in “Madness” seems to be between the way Jaafari looks on the outside—as an Iraqi American who looks suspiciously like a terrorist, who even, for instance has two passports, one American, one Iraqi—and the rich and fascinating, and entirely innocent, life that he’s actually led.  That part of the book does seem a huge imaginative leap, and in that way is more impressive.  I’m amazed at the idea of even writing that section, much less putting the two sections together in one book.

There is also the asymmetry of the lives in the two halves: on the one hand, this older man and much younger woman who carry on an innocent love affair, while, at roughly the same historical moment, a man can’t even visit his brother in Baghdad because he has a suspicious looking passport.  There is a moment in “Madness” when residents of Baghdad talk about what their city used to be like, before the American invasion.  “They told me that as recently at the seventies it looked like Istanbul does now: bustling with tourists and businesspeople, a thriving cosmopolitan capital in an ascendant Middle East.  Before Iran, before Saddam, before sanctions and Operation Iraqi Freedom and now this, theirs too had been a country of culture, of education and commerce and beauty, and people came from all over to see it and be a part of it.  And now?  Do you see, Amar, this chaos outside our doors, this madness?”  That is the kind of thing no one ever talks about when they discuss foreign policy.  Yet it is the very texture of people’s lives.

Halliday’s talent in the first half of this novel is impressive.  In the second half it’s astonishing.