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The disconnect has presented problems for American writers trying to portray the countrys reality.
Its an impossible task because American reality isnt coherent, even if novels about it ought to be.
In her first novel Lisa Halliday adopts a conceptual strategy declared in the books title,Asymmetry.
His remarks are the metafictional bow that ties this very self-conscious novel together.
She published her first short story, Stump Louis, in theParis Reviewin 2005.
Its a big hit, and no caller stunts him until the night Pearl Harbor is attacked.
Their (our) generation had been told history ended in the 1990s.
WithinAsymmetrys framework, Alice is an authorial alter ego and the first section a teasing autofiction.
Readers from publishing circles will recognize tweaked versions of familiar rumors.
Ezra is constantly being denied the Nobel, which is awarded instead to Imre Kertesz, to J.M.
Coetzee, to Elfriede Jelinek.
The age gap allows them to act like adolescents together.
They speak in code.
She picks him up goodies from Zabars.
Sex is treated coyly, but we know his back problems are an issue.
The affair is by turns sweet, naughty, and achingly poignant.
Alices life outside it is dreary.
Shes the child of divorced parents, and her father is a conspiracy theorist and a gun nut.
She has an elderly neighbor creeping into advanced stages of dementia.
Her job is a drag.
A one-night stand with a colleague results in a condom malfunction, a pregnancy, and an abortion.
In other words, the experience is part of her education.
Ezra intuits that Alice is a writer herself and asks her what she writes about: Other people.
People more interesting than I am …Muslim hot dog sellers.
The conversation goes on:
Ezra looked skeptical.
Do you write about your father?
I know, but writing about myself doesnt seem important enough.
Forget about world affairs.
World affairs can take care of themselves.
Theyre not doing a very good job of it.
Amars story is that attempt at conjuring.
Its not such a far stretch.
A few incidents in Amars story take on the quality of a thriller.
And what difference does it make to think of Amar as Alices, rather than Hallidays, creation?
Its hard to deny, by the novels end, that Alice/Halliday has pulled off this stunt of transcendence.
