Assymetry, by Lisa Halliday

I get many of my books from PaperbackSwap. The way this often works out is I hear about a book I think I'd like to read. I go to PaperbackSwap, where the book isn't typically available immediately, so I add the book to my wishlist. Some period of time later – maybe months, maybe years – I get an email telling me the book is available and I'm next on the list to get it. By this time, I often don't remember anything about the book – what about it made me want to read it, who recommended it – but I usually trust my former self and go ahead and request the book. This is how I ended up with a copy of Asymmetry in my mailbox last week. The cover informed me that it had made the New York Times' "Ten Best Books of the Year" list, which may be how I found my way to it. I usually do read that list and make note of the entries that sound of interest. 

In any case, I was plodding my way through another book (these seems to happen to me more and more lately), but I had a long, round-trip subway ride on the horizon over the weekend and I decided to start something new. By the time I got home from that outing, I was 100 pages into Asymmetry and I finished it two days later. It's very readable. (Ironically, perhaps, the book opens with a character reading a book that's very unreadable. Perhaps this was the clue that made me think it would be a good read for a long subway ride.) The book is divided into three more or less connected parts. The first centers on Alice and her relationship with a much older successful writer. The section was interesting to me, because I've long been fascinated with these types of asymmetrical relationships – not so much the age disparity, but the power disparity. I think they interest me because it's very hard for me to imagine being in that kind of relationship. It's hardly my best quality, but I'm aware that I'm a person who prefers power in my relationships (romantic and otherwise). What Alice gets out of this relationship is an education – and she wants it. It reminded me of a conversation I had years ago with a much younger friend who told me she liked her partners to teach her things. It was so bizarre to me at the time, I don't think I could even fathom what she meant. (It's not that I don't like to learn from my partners at all, but I'm a person who likes to learn collaboratively – co-discovery. This was one of the great strengths of my marriage, until it wasn't.) The second section of the book is an apparently unrelated (though there are hints here and there as to the provenance) first person narrative by an Iraqi-American man who has been stopped at immigration at Heathrow, where he has a stopover en route to Iraq. We learn a great deal about this man, from his birth to the present day (2011-ish) in the roughly 100 pages that are devoted to his story. And then we leave him at Heathrow and return to the older writer from the first section, who narrates his life story to a BBC radio host for an installment of Desert Island Discs. This third section brings to the reader's attention that we barely got to know the writer in the first section. I didn't find Asymmetry to be quite as profound as many of the blurbs seemed to suggest it was, but it was a very enjoyable read.