Asymmetry

A Novel

Lisa Halliday

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781501166778
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Literatur Allgemein

A TIME and NEW YORK TIMES TOP 10 BOOK of the YEAR * New York Times Notable Book and Times Critic's Top Book of 2018 NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF 2018 BY * Elle * Bustle * Kirkus Reviews * Lit Hub * NPR * O, The Oprah Magazine * Shelf Awareness The bestselling and critically acclaimed debut novel by Lisa Halliday, hailed as "extraordinary" by The New York Times, "a brilliant and complex examination of power dynamics in love and war" by The Wall Street Journal, and "a literary phenomenon" by The New Yorker. Told in three distinct and uniquely compelling sections, Asymmetry explores the imbalances that spark and sustain many of our most dramatic human relations: inequities in age, power, talent, wealth, fame, geography, and justice. The first section, "Folly, " tells the story of Alice, a young American editor, and her relationship with the famous and much older writer Ezra Blazer. A tender and exquisite account of an unexpected romance that takes place in New York during the early years of the Iraq War, "Folly" also suggests an aspiring novelist's coming-of-age. By contrast, "Madness" is narrated by Amar, an Iraqi-American man who, on his way to visit his brother in Kurdistan, is detained by immigration officers and spends the last weekend of 2008 in a holding room in Heathrow. These two seemingly disparate stories gain resonance as their perspectives interact and overlap, with yet new implications for their relationship revealed in an unexpected coda.A stunning debut from a rising literary star, Asymmetry is "a transgressive roman a clef, a novel of ideas, and a politically engaged work of metafiction" ( The New York Times Book Review ), and a "masterpiece" in the original sense of the word" ( The Atlantic ). Lisa Halliday's novel will captivate any reader with while also posing arresting questions about the very nature of fiction itself.

I FOLLY

We all live slapstick lives, under an inexplicable sentence of death…

—MARTIN GARDNER, The Annotated Alice

ALICE WAS BEGINNING TO get very tired of all this sitting by herself with nothing to do: every so often she tried again to read the book in her lap, but it was made up almost exclusively of long paragraphs, and no quotation marks whatsoever, and what is the point of a book, thought Alice, that does not have any quotation marks?

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.

“What are you reading?”

Alice showed it to him.

“Is that the one with the watermelons?”

Alice had not yet read anything about watermelons, but she nodded anyway.

“What else do you read?”

“Oh, old stuff, mostly.”

They sat without speaking for a while, the man eating his ice cream and Alice pretending to read her book. Two joggers in a row gave them a second glance as they passed. Alice knew who he was—she’d known the moment he sat down, turning her cheeks watermelon pink—but in her astonishment she could only continue staring, like a studious little garden gnome, at the impassable pages that lay open in her lap. They might as well have been made of concrete.

“So,” said the man, rising. “What’s your name?”

“Alice.”

“Who likes old stuff. See you around.”

---

The next Sunday, she was sitting in the same spot, trying to read another book, this one about an angry volcano and a flatulent king.

“You,” he said.

“Alice.”

“Alice. What are you reading that for? I thought you wanted to be a writer.”

“Who said that?”

“Didn’t you?”

His hand shook a little as he broke off a square of chocolate and held it out.

“Thank you,” said Alice.

“You’re velcome,” he replied.

Biting into her chocolate, Alice gave him a quizzical look.

“Don’t you know that joke? A man flying into Honolulu says to the guy in the seat next to him, ‘Excuse me, how do you pronounce it? Hawaii or Havaii?’ ‘Havaii,’ says the other guy. ‘Thank you,’ says the first guy. And the other guy says, ‘You’re velcome.’ ”

Still chewing, Alice laughed. “Is that a Jewish joke?”

The writer crossed his legs and folded his hands in his lap. “What do you think?”

---

The third Sunday, he bought two cones from Mister Softee and offered her one. Alice accepted it, as she had done with the chocolate, because it was beginning to drip and in any case multiple–Pulitzer Prize winners don’t go around poisoning people.

They ate their ice cream and watched a pair of pigeons peck at a straw. Alice, whose blue sandals matched the zigzags on her dress, flexed a foot idly in the sun.

“So. Miss Alice. Are you game?”

She looked at him.

He looked at her.

Alice laughed.

“Are you game?” he repeated.

Turning back to her cone: “Well, no reason not to be, I guess.”

The writer got up to throw his napkin away and came back to her. “There are plenty of reasons not to be.”

Alice squinted up at him and smiled.

“How old are you?”

“Twenty-five.”

“Boyfriend?”

She shook her head.

“Job?”

“I’m an editorial assistant. At Gryphon.”

Hands in his pockets, he lifted his chin slightly and seemed to conclude this made sense.

“All right. Shall we take a walk together next Saturday?”

Alice nodded.

“Here at four?”

She nodded again.

“I should take your number. In case something comes up.”

While another jogger slowed to look at him, Alice wrote it down on the bookmark that had come with her book.

“You’ve lost your place,” said the writer.

“That’s okay,” said Alice.

---

On Saturday, it rained. Alice was sitting on the checkered floor of her bathroom, trying to screw tight her broken toilet seat with a butter knife, when her cell phone beeped: CALLER ID BLOCKED.

“Hello Alice? It’s Mister Softee. Where are you?”

“At home.”

“Where is that?”

“Eighty-Fifth and Broadway.”

“Oh, right around the corner. We could string up a couple of tin cans.”

Alice pictured a string, bowing like a giant jump rope over Amsterdam, trembling between them whenever they spoke.

“So, Miss Alice. What should we do? Would you like to come here, and talk a while? Or should we take a walk together another day?”

“I’ll come there.”

“You’ll come here. Very good. Four thirty?”

Alice wrote the address down on a piece of junk mail. Then she put a hand over her mouth and waited.

“Actually, let’s say five. See you here at five?”

---

The rain flooded the crosswalks and soaked her feet. The cabs churning a spray up Amsterdam seemed to be traveling much faster than they did when it was dry. While his doorman made room for her by pressing himself into a cruciform position, Alice entered purposefully: long strides, blowing out her cheeks, shaking out her umbrella. The elevator was plated top to bottom with warped brass. Either the floors it climbed were very tall or the elevator was moving very slowly, because she had plenty of time to frown at her infinite funhouse reflections and to worry more than a little about what was going to happen next.

When the elevator doors opened, there was a hallway containing six more gray doors. She was about to knock on the first door she came to when another door, on the other side of the elevator, opened a crack and a hand came through, holding a glass.

Alice accepted the glass, which was full of water.

The door closed.

Alice took a sip.

The next time the door opened, it seemed to swing wide on its own. Alice hesitated before carrying her water down a short hallway that ended in a bright white room containing, among other things, a draughtsman’s desk and an unusually wide bed.

“Show me your purse,” he said from behind her.

She did.

“Now open it please. For security reasons.”

Alice set her purse down on the little glass table between them and unlatched it. She took out her wallet: a brown leather men’s wallet that was badly worn and torn. A scratch card, purchased for a dollar and worth the same. A ChapStick. A comb. A key ring. A barrette. A mechanical pencil. A few loose coins and, finally, three portable tampons, which she held in her palm like bullets. Fuzz. Grit.

“No phone?”

“I left it at home.”

He picked up the wallet, fingering a bit of stitching that had come undone. “This is a disgrace, Alice.”

“I know.”

He opened the wallet and removed her debit card, her credit card, an expired Dunkin’ Donuts gift card, her driver’s license, her college ID, and twenty-three dollars in bills. Holding up one of the cards: “Mary-Alice.” Alice wrinkled her nose.

“You don’t like the Mary part.”

“Do you?”

For a moment, he alternated between looking at her and at the card, as though trying to decide which version of her he preferred. Then he nodded, tapped the cards into alignment, snapped a rubber band from his desk around them and the bills, and dropped the stack back into her purse. The wallet he lobbed into a mesh-wire wastepaper basket already lined with a white cone of discarded typescript. The sight of this seemed to irritate him briefly.

“So, Mary-Alice…” He sat down, gesturing for her to do the same. The seat of his reading chair was black leather and low to the ground, like a Porsche. “What else can I do for you?”

Alice looked around. On the draughtsman’s desk a fresh manuscript awaited his attention. Beyond it a pair of sliding glass doors gave onto a small balcony sheltered by the one above it from the rain. Behind her the enormous bed was made up so neatly as to look aloof.

“Do you want to go outside?”

“Okay.”

“No one throws the other one over. Deal?”

Alice smiled and, still sitting five feet from him, extended a hand. The writer lowered his eyes to look at it for a long, doubtful moment, as though listed there on her palm were the pros and cons of every handshake he’d ever made.

“On second thought,” he said then. “Come here.”

---

His skin was lined and cool.

His lips were soft—but then his teeth were behind them.

At her office, there were no fewer than three National Book Award certificates in his name framed on the lobby wall.

The second time, when she knocked, several seconds went by with no answer.

“It’s me,” Alice said to the door.

The door opened a crack and a hand came through, holding a box.

Alice took the box.

The door closed.

Lincoln Stationers, it said on the box, tooled smartly in gold. Inside, under a single sheet of white tissue paper, lay a burgundy wallet with a coin purse and a clutch clasp.

“Oh my goodness!” said Alice. “It’s so pretty. Thank you.”

“You’re velcome,” said the door.

Again, she was given a glass of water.

Again, they did what they did without disturbing the bed.

Over her sweater, he put a hand on each breast, as if to silence her.

“This one’s bigger.”

“Oh,” said Alice, looking down unhappily.

“No no; it’s not an imperfection. There’s no such thing as a matching pair.”

“Like snowflakes?” suggested Alice.

“Like snowflakes,” he agreed.

---

From his stomach all the way up to his sternum ran a pink, zipperlike scar. Another scar bisected his leg from groin to ankle. Two more made a faint circumflex above his hip. And that was just the front.

“Who did this to you?”

“Norman Mailer.”

While she was tugging up her tights, he got up to turn the Yankees game on. “Ooh, I love baseball,” said Alice.

“Do you? Which team?”

“The Red Sox. When I was little, my grandmother used to take me to Fenway every year.”

“Is she still alive, your grandmother?”

“Yep. Would you like her number? You’re about the same age.”

“It’s a little early in our relationship for you to be satirizing me, Mary-Alice.”

“I know,” laughed Alice. “I’m sorry.”

They watched as Jason Giambi slugged a three-two pitch into left center.

“Oh!” said the writer, getting up. “I almost forgot. I bo...