Asymmetry

Lisa Halliday's debut effort is an original, intelligent, ecomomically written work. The story is told in three parts, each illustrating imbalance in human relationships. Folly is about an unromantic affair between Ezra, an ageing famous writer, and Mary Alice, a young woman who is a junior editor at a publishing house. It is said that Ezra is modelled after Philip Roth who Halliday was involved with once upon a time. He is generous but controlling and the dynamic of their relationship made my skin crawl.
Madness tells the story of Amar, an Iraqi-American doctoral student (economics) who is held at Customs at Heathrow Airport while enroute to visit his brother who is a physician in Kurdistan. During his detention he reflects on the destruction of Iraq as a result of war.
The third section is entitled Ezra Blazer's Desert Island Discs, Ezra being the author in the first section. He is on a popular BBC show discussing his favourite pieces of music and what makes them special to him, mostly women he has loved and left over the years. He  flirts clumsily with the host of the show and reveals himself to be a rather dreadful person.
The shift from the first to the second section is jarring and I wondered if they were actually two stand-alone stories until Ezra, during the interview in part three, drops an offhand remark that reveals the connection between the characters in sections one and two. It is very subtle and I might have missed it altogether had I had not been trying to sort out what point Halliday was trying to make. It is about gender, age and race and how those with power set the rules. I liked Halliday's dispassionate  style. Perhaps what I liked most about Asymmetry is that it required some effort on my part to make sense of the book. The more I reflect on it the more I appreciate what I have read.