Asymmetry, by Lisa Halliday
“‘Curiouser and curiouser!’ cried Alice.”
Alice treats herself to ice cream from a Mister Softee in Midtown Manhattan (let’s say the one on Lexington Avenue in Murray Hill), when a multiple Pulitzer Prize-winning author two-and-a-half times her age sits down next to her. An aspiring writer working as an apprentice editor herself, Alice recognizes the man before he flirts with her. From that point, they embark upon an improbable relationship.
If the name of the main character of this novel evokes images of hookah-smoking caterpillars sitting atop mushrooms while dishing out snark, you’re in luck. Halliday provides ample encouragement for us to connect the plucky protagonist of Asymmetry with the Alice of White Rabbit fame. When speaking with her elderly gentleman on the phone for the first time, for instance, our Alice sits on her black and white checkered bathroom floor, a mise en scène that recalls the chessboard sequence in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. When Alice goes to her lover’s apartment on Eighty-Fifth and Broadway, he extends a glass of something out the door for her to take and then closes it, referring to the “Drink Me” elixir that transforms the wayward lass in Carrol’s story. While never entering magical realism, Halliday writes in a fragmentary, episodic style that suggests the fantastical undergirding of Wonderland.
More sinister, Alice’s extreme age gap with her lover would seem to imply a reference to the urban legend of Lewis Carrol’s pedophilia. Despite persistent opinion to the contrary, we have no reason to believe that Carrol proposed to real-life Alice Pleasance Liddel, for whom he wrote his timeless tales, by the way. Carrol’s intimacy with the Liddel family without question crosses the line into Victorian eccentricity (as did P.M. Barry’s relationship with Llewelyn Davies family, which resulted in Peter Pan at around the same time period.) The fact that Carrol’s family excised portions of his meticulous diaries after his death, presumably due to embarrassing content, comes the closest to a “smoking gun” for impropriety. In the absence of extant evidence, however, the case of Carrol’s missing diary entries kind of has to sit in the same category of the right-wing fever dream of “Hunter Biden’s laptop,” which is to say, fictional Jabberwocky’s that partisans invent due to confirmation bias.
Nevertheless, Halliday parcels out incriminating clues along the way, in case we weren’t convinced she was questioning Carrol’s motives chumming with an adolescent. During jury duty, an officer announces Alice’s full name as “Mary-Alice Dodge,” again referring to the myth of Carrol’s desire to marry the underage Liddel. “Dodge” also references Lewis Carrol’s real name, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson. Mary-Alice makes a comment at one point about the “ninety-seven” years of her and his (Ezra Blazer) combined age. She says that she’s twenty-five in the first chapter, though two years seem to go by. Anyway, you can do the math.
Speaking of numbers, as the relationship progresses, Alice falls down the well-appointed Sugar Daddy/Sugar Baby Rabbit Hole. As a wealthy man, Blazer lives a different sort of New York lifestyle that Alice can participate in by herself. He would not think of buying condiments from anywhere other than the luxury grocers, Zabar’s. When Alice breaks her hand on an icy step, Blazer has the number for “best hand guy” on his phone. He has a place in eastern Long Island where he goes when he wants to write in isolation. He mulls buying a vacated adjoining small apartment for $2million to hedge against the chance that someone with a screaming baby might move in. A modern relationship, the couple takes advantage of an open sexual arrangement, but they do love one another.
Nevertheless, Alice comes close to her breaking point as Wonderland proves too much. At the end of “Part I,” she stays with Blazer overnight in a hospital room due to one of his various geriatric conditions. Blazer senses the age gap pushing Alice away, so he says to her, “Alice…Don’t leave me. Don’t go. I want a partner in life. Do you know? We’re just getting started. No one could love you as much as I do. Choose this. Choose the adventure, Alice. This is the adventure. This is the misadventure. This is living.” Just in case you missed the theme.
Okay, that much makes sense.
Part II zags to Part I’s zig. Apropos of nothing in particular (other than asymmetry itself, I suppose), we switch to first-person POV as we join an Iraqi-American economist, Dr. Amar Ala Jaafar, as he endures the purgatory of Desert Storm-era U.K. passport control during a layover on his way to Istanbul. Jaafar wants to spend two days in London visiting his friend, a mentor-like war photojournalist, before flying to northern Iraq to visit his brother, but race-biased bureaucracy flummoxes his travel plans.
Jaafar proves a compelling character, and whereas Part I has no real super-objective, Jaafar sets out on a journey to achieve something. Nevertheless, Part II does not connect to the Alica-Ezra story in any discernible way. In a flashback conversation, Jaafar’s then-girlfriend asks him what one book he would take with him to a desert island, and, de rigueur, he chooses Carrol’s Complete Adventures of Alice. He also makes an offhand comment about a “minor asymmetry” from the Arabic to the Kurdish word for “money changer,” an oblique nod to the name of the book’s title, all of which constitutes the stitching Halliday provides to conjoin the constituent novellas.
Attempting something like an ABA structure as a sop to story arc, “Part III” transitions into a present tense transcript of a radio host’s interview with Blazer. We have moved forward in time and he appears to have won a Nobel Prize for literature after years of near-misses. Blazer makes no further mention of Alice, other than referring to a young friend wrote a “rather surprising little novel” about “the extent to which we’re able to penetrate the looking-glass” and thus overcome life’s blind spots. The host asks Blazer to recount anecdotes from different phases of his life, which all contain classical music references. She alternates his answers with playing the record from each story, which seems like a cool format for a real podcast. Halliday gives Blazer the last lines of the novel, when he asks the young female host, on air, out on a date (“Are you game?”) to a concert at Royal Festival Hall. You get the sense she’ll say yes once they’re done recording.
As a stage practitioner, I like asymmetry. In fact, I privilege unevenness as a compositional tool. Choreographers want to arrange their dancers center-center of the performing area, which seems like composing a symphony around Middle C. Designers build their playsets with a similar sense of centeredness. What’s the point? Symmetry lacks movement. Once a chord progression resolves, where do you go? Stability kills momentum. Balance proves boring.
At the same time, traditional story structure works. When you toss Aristotle’s two-thousand-year-old precepts out the narratological window, you end up with a pleasant literary exercise. Arbiters of taste will denigrate genre fiction as “page turners,” as if audience entrainment constitutes something undesirable. Like most books, I enjoyed Halliday’s Asymmetry. I can’t say that it will stay with me, but I will always follow Alice’s lead. We all have our rabbits to pursue.
Time waits for no one.