ASYMMETRY by Lisa Halliday

This novel may be a little too clever for me.  It contains three sections, and I had to reread the third in order to determine how the Kafkaesque middle section related to the other two.  The middle section is narrated in first person by an Iraqi-American who is stranded at Heathrow for no rational reason.  Although he holds an American passport, he is detained by airport officials and has to adjust his itinerary accordingly.  I did not love this section, in which the narrator reflects on other periods of his life, partly because I loved the completely different preceding section and partly because in my mind I merged this middle story with Homeland Elegies, which I finished right before starting this book.  The delightful first section is about Alice, a young woman working for a publishing house and having an affair with a much older famous writer named Ezra Blazer.  Even I am clever enough to recognize the similarities between Ezra, who keeps hoping for a Nobel prize, and Philip Roth.  He educates and assists his young lover, both financially and intellectually, correcting her anglicized pronunciation of Camus and recommending books for her to read.  The relationship between these two is complicated.  In one sense, they are using each other, and yet they genuinely care for one another, although perhaps asymmetrically.  Alice is no slouch when it comes to verbal sparring with Ezra and is obviously ambivalent about whether their relationship is ultimately a beneficial experience for her.  His friends ask her repeatedly about when/if she plans to have children, and her frank answer is that she does not want children until she is forty, indicating to me that she has professional ambitions.  The short third section of the book is an interview with Ezra regarding his favorite classical music pieces.  However, he also drops a few other new tidbits of information, including the one that provides a tie-in to the middle section of the book.