In her debut novel,"Asymmetry," Lisa Halliday explores uneven power dynamics on small and large scales — between two people in a relationship, and between an individual and the awesome power of a state and its security apparatus.
The novel is split into three parts, which seem, at first, to have little in common with each other. The first follows the romance between a young woman in her 20s who works in a publishing house and an older, well-established author named Ezra Blazer. Blazer has a lot in common with the late novelist Philip Roth — and, in fact, Halliday herself had a relationship with Roth when she was in her 20s. They remained friends until his death in May.
The second part follows an Iraqi-American man, Amar, who is being held by security at Heathrow Airport. He uses the time spent in a sort of limbo to reflect back on his life and childhood. The third, a radio interview with Blazer, offers surprising clues about how the three parts have more connections with each other than the reader may have initially realized.
One of the themes of the novel, with its shifting narrators, is the power of developing empathy for people with different life experiences than one's own. Halliday, who grew up in Medfield, Mass., told Boston Public Radio that that's one of the themes in her writing process, too.
"Through this process, and I think through writing fiction, generally, for writers, it's a way of discovering that we are not so different as we think we are," she said.
