FICTION IN REVIEW

Abstract

1 5 4 Y F I C T I O N I N R E V I E W A Y T E N T A R T I C I ‘‘For her part, Alice was starting to consider really rather seriously whether a former choirgirl from Massachusetts might be capable of conjuring the consciousness of a Muslim man.’’ Having just ordered hotdogs from a halal cart on the Upper West Side, the twenty-something publishing assistant Alice in Lisa Halliday’s striking debut novel Asymmetry asks herself a delicate compositional question: Can a white Christian girl from New England accurately portray the consciousness of a male Muslim immigrant ? Jonathan Franzen would tend to say no. In a 2016 interview with Slate, the American novelist argued that not having many African American friends precluded him from writing a novel with a black protagonist: ‘‘If you have not had direct firsthand experience of loving a category of person – a person of a di√erent race, a profoundly religious person, things that are real stark differences between people – I think it is very hard to dare, or necessarily even want, to write fully from the inside of a person.’’ Franzen frames the choice to represent otherness not just as an act A s y m m e t r y : A N o v e l , by Lisa Halliday (Simon and Schuster, 288 pp., $26) 1 5 5 R of audacity but also as an almost unnatural, transgressive wish. The polemic is as old as James Joyce’s rendering of the inner thoughts of an Irish Jew, Leopold Bloom, but is given fresh life in Asymmetry, which both rises to the challenge of and wrestles with the possibility of intercultural representation. Asymmetry has an unusual tripartite structure. The first section , titled ‘‘Folly,’’ chronicles the relationship between Alice and the aging writer Ezra, and is modeled on Halliday’s own relationship with Philip Roth when she was in her twenties and he in his sixties. By contrast, the second section, ‘‘Madness,’’ is the firstperson account of Amar, an Iraqi American graduate student of Kurdish extraction, in the period leading up to and just after the 2003 American invasion of Iraq. The third part, ‘‘Ezra Blazer’s Desert Island Discs,’’ loops back to the fictionalized version of Roth, but in the unconventional format of a BBC radio interview. Halliday thus deliberately mixes writing about what she knows, her relationship with Roth, with writing about what she ostensibly does not, the first-person account of an Iraqi American. While ‘‘Folly’’ covers familiar ground, taking place in literary New York, mostly within a couple of blocks between Amsterdam and Broadway , ‘‘Madness’’ shuttles among Los Angeles, New York, London, Amman, Baghdad, and Sulaymaniyah in Iraqi Kurdistan. Intensifying the geographical unfamiliarity, Amar finds himself navigating culturally liminal and often uncomfortable spaces: a windowless immigration holding room at Heathrow, a smoke-filled rental car shared with an Iraqi intelligence o≈cer on the road from Jordan to Iraq. The sweep of Halliday’s novel at first feels at odds with the fiction of Roth, who, after all, wrote nine novels about his own literary alter-ego, Nathan Zuckerman. That outsized attention to male ego at the expense of all else led Sondra Bleich to remark that ‘‘Roth’s women either materialize out of a Dewing landscape, so ethereal as to be unattainable, or lunge at us from a De Kooning abstract, so gross as to be totally undesirable. In either case, they are unreal.’’ The alleged flatness of his female characters has resulted in the oft-repeated critical appraisal of his work as closeminded and misogynist. While Halliday wanders the globe, Roth is stuck in suburban New Jersey. In Asymmetry, Roth’s doppelgän- 1 5 6 T A R T I C I Y ger, Ezra, even admonishes Alice with the hackneyed MFA dictum to write what she knows: ‘‘Do you write about this? About us?’’ ‘‘No.’’ ‘‘Is that true?’’ Alice shook her head hopelessly. ‘‘It’s impossible.’’ . . . Ezra looked skeptical. ‘‘Do you write about your father?’’ ‘‘No.’’ ‘‘You should. It’s a gift.’’ ‘‘I know. But writing about myself doesn’t seem important enough.’’ ‘‘As opposed to...