Lisa Halliday, _Asymmetry_

FROM ONE ANGLE, we have two interesting, well-written novellas, either of which would have made a  respectable debut. By presenting them as an ensemble, Halliday creates something not just interesting, but unique and worth close attention.

Part 1, "Folly" (the first novella), is narrated by Alice, a bright, literary-minded 25-year-old woman working for a New York publisher. Alice meets and has a fairly lengthy affair with Ezra Blazer, a famous novelist about forty years her senior. It's about the time of the Iraq war, but Alice does not seem to be paying it much attention--not as much as she pays to the possibility that the Red Sox are at long last going to win a World Series. Blazer is a dead ringer for Philip Roth, with whom Halliday did, she has said, have an affair. Saturated with Manhattan detail and an engaging portrait of the Roth-like novelist, who is kind, generous, and wise, "Folly" is a brisk read.

Part 2, "Madness," toggles between two narratives. In one, we track a difficult encounter between airport security officials and Amar Jaafari (an economist, born in USA to Iraqi parents). In the other, Amar recounts his history, his brother Sami's decision to return to live in Iraq, and the family's efforts to re-connect with Sami after the fall of Saddam Hussein.

"Folly" is a worthy example of might-as-well-be-autobigraphy fiction, female coming of age division. "Madness" is a more audacious jump, inhabiting a narrator of another gender and another culture, with the added high stakes of addressing the question of the American empire throwing its weight around. Here, too, Halliday succeeds.

The brilliant stroke, though, is her finding a way to make the two fictions speak to each other. Halliday does this in the novel's short (< 30 pages) final section, presented as a transcript of Blazer's appearance on Desert Island Discs, in which he notes that a brilliant young friend of his has just written a fine work of fiction about the Iraq war. "Madness," we thus learn, was also written by Alice, and so represents the opposite pole of fiction-writing from that of "Folly," which is that of her mentor, Blazer, who, Roth-like, wrote fiction by mining every last bit of ore from his own memory and experience (including Halliday, maybe, in Exit Ghost?). The Alice of "Madness" is the kind of writer who imagines her way out of her own circumstances...except that "Folly" shows adeptness at, precisely, mining the ore of your own memory and experience, so she is both Roth-like and not at all Roth-like.

But even more interesting than that is unpacking the suggestion of the title: in both fictions, we are looking at asymmetries of power. Amar is brilliant, accomplished, and I daresay assimilated, but even so he is going to get hung up at the airport. Power is going to show him who's boss. Blazer is generous, kind, and wise, but he also wants the affair strictly on his terms and under his control, and so it is. Alice is inside the American literary elite, kinda-sorta, except that when you come right down to it, she's not.

Amar's and Alice's rhyming situations give one a lot to ponder--this seems to me a great classroom novel. Highly readable, but also formally innovative, and furthermore insightful about identity and power.