Asymmetry – The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Enjoys Lisa Halliday’s beautiful depiction of power imbalanced relationships

This book is a very good read.  Indeed, it may be a great book.  It starts, inauspiciously, with a gossipy rendition of the author’s affair, apparently when she was 26, with Philip Roth – the giant of American fiction.  The asymmetry between them is depicted, we only realize later, by the ways in which she as a person is erased in her depiction of the relationship.  Roth (under the pseudonym Ezra Blazer) occludes Alice (Halliday’s pseudonym) and we are drawn, with her, into our curiosity about him, and react to the ways in which his not so subtly turning her into a prostitute – giving her a wallet, a watch, a scarf, paying off her college loans – in exchange not just for sex with his decrepit body, but also for love – in whatever ways we do.  But initially there is prurient interest that has a moral tone - especially in this age when May-December romances having a predatory feel to them rather than the kind of free pass they may once have been given.  We watch with fascination her connection to a man who is imprisoned within both his failing body and in the ways in which his fame and his intense openness to human experience makes casual contact caustic, but we also feel a great deal of concern for Alice - can she handle this relationship?

Like all great novels, when read analytically, this book opens up and comments on the inner life of the reader.  For you it will be (or has been) whatever it is, for me: I was a student at an alternative campus of a suburban high school.  Not nearly so glamorous as the literary Manhattan that Halliday describes, it was intentionally created by conservative but caring administrators listening to students at the height of our last cultural upheaval – the one that took place along generational fault lines – in the late 1960s and early 1970s.  They recognized that the main campus of the High School, with 3,000 students and traditional classrooms felt cold, impersonal and irrelevant to a significant minority of bright, creative students who were dropping or zoning out despite considerable promise.  They created a campus with 150 students and 7 faculty members who would, together, determine the curriculum, government, and culture of the campus.  In the process, and intentionally, the faculty became, instead of distant dispensers of information, confidants who were available to talk about the hopes and dreams, but also the fears and difficulties of the students, not just in the classroom, but in the smoking lounge behind the school, on the softball field and in the log cabin we built together on the campus.

Lisa Halliday

Halliday is intentionally addressing the issues of the metoo movement.  It is only incidentally that we discover that the character that she chooses to call Alice – who is intentionally a version of the Alice who has journeyed into the rabbit hole and through the looking glass (both metaphors that are elaborated in the novel) – is more than a sexual bauble.  We discover gradually and seemingly accidentally that she is not just the person who can’t finish anything, the person who can’t pronounce Camus, as she is originally introduced, but a Harvard graduate.  We hear her word play with the lauded author where she gives as well as she gets, and we begin to wonder, with her, whether she is selling herself short in the relationship.  Across time, we discover that Ezra/Roth is more and more dependent on Alice/Halliday and we cringe a bit when she exerts her power to extricate herself from the relationship,when she begins to play the role of her Boston Red Sox - down three none to his vaunted Yankees in the playoffs and the comeback begins and the imbalance of power becomes not as great as it has appeared - we see a shift coming.  Her ability to acknowledge the power of her end of the asymmetry – her youth and the life before her – threatens to expose the possibility that this relationship must necessarily include harm to one or the other of them – and this ending seems unsatisfying – it seems neither of them will have ended up profiting from their relationship after it dissolves.

In the wake of a recent reunion, a student from my school indicated in a school Facebook group that one of the highly regarded faculty members – one of only three faculty members with a room in the school building named after him – had abused him when he was a student (the faculty member is now deceased).  Other students indicated that there were additional abused students who did not want to be publicly identified but had similar experiences.  The student who came forward described his first interaction with the faculty member was when the faculty member asked him to go with him to the store to buy school supplies.  On the main campus, this would have been a red flag – on the alternative campus, this level of closeness was encouraged, and it advertised to the student he could have a special relationship with the faculty member – little did he know how special it would be and how getting into the faculty member’s car was equivalent to getting into the dreaded ice cream truck.

Philip Roth/Ezra Blazer

Blazer invites Alice (one of the asymmetries is that we don’t know Alice’s last name - it is Dodge - until it is mentioned just once when she is on jury duty - while we do know Ezra’s - but we do have a fully articulated alias for her - including a last name - that Roth invents so that they don't end up in the pages of the Daily News) into his affair with her on the occasion of their third meeting in the park by asking her, “Are you game?”  She knows who he is and he knows that she knows who he is from her blush at their first meeting – but they have never spoken of that.  He is Mister Softee (he has offered her the dreaded ice cream but she decides to take it because Pulitzer prize winners don’t poison people (or do they?)).  Their agreement about going out onto the balcony but implicitly about starting the relationship is that “No one throws the other one over…  Deal.”  The relationship between my peer and the teacher was more complicated and even more one sided.  And the relationship was sealed by the shame that the teacher counted on the student to experience and which would guarantee his silence.  And perhaps Blazer counted on Alice’s shame to prevent her describing her participation in their relationship – she wouldn’t throw him over by publicly exposing him out of modesty.  This book, though, takes a turn.  Rather than exploring the dissolution of the relationship, the story ends (until a coda) with the impact of the affair on each of them hanging in the air and abruptly shifts to another, seemingly unrelated story with a different level of asymmetry.

The second story is told, unlike the first, in the first person.  It is as if Alice/Lisa has found her voice.  But the voice she finds is that of a male Muslim who was born in American air space as his parents were immigrating and grew up here as an American citizen, but also as a citizen of Iraq.  And the story, that at first seems unrelated (and remains so in terms of connections between characters or plot), is told in chapters that alternate between his being held in London as an adult on his way back to what is now war-torn Iraq to try to find his brother at the height of the chaos (or as this section is titled: madness), and a kaleidoscopic collection of recollections that allow us to understand the backstory that brings him to this moment.  

Inhabiting the mind of another, and doing that as masterfully as this woman has done, requires a certain hubris.  You have to be a very good writer to do that – and even very good writers draw the line at articulating the experience of those who are essentially different – as Kathryn Stockett did in The Help.  And Alice/Lisa gets the explicit stamp of approval for the writing of the middle section of the novel in the brief coda at the end of the novel from none other than Ezra/Philip himself, clarifying that the relationship between them may have had depth that wasn’t articulated in the early part of this novel and that the resolution was not as problematic as we feared.  Further, her work to bridge asymmetrical divides elevates her over her lofty lover/mentor, who was an exquisite writer of his own (Jewish) experience but who was characterized in one obituary as being an author who “… wrote of suburban, gentile America with clueless banality.”  It is not up to me, of course, to evaluate the “authenticity” of Halliday’s characterization of a Muslim (though it scans well to my ear), but she gets aspects of the male world right as she crashes through the gendered looking glass.  More importantly to the arc of the novel, she gets the asymmetry between the U.S. and Iraq – and the asymmetrical relationship between being a U.S. citizen and a citizen of a third world country that we are at war with (or putatively on behalf of). 

The first section – where the asymmetry is not as pronounced as in the second – is titled “Folly”.  The distinction between folly and madness is one of degree and what the line between those is became controversial in our Facebook conversations about the teacher.  The issue is: What do we do with the positive contributions of our deeply flawed teacher?  We have struggled with that within the psychoanalytic discipline where highly respected writers and teachers have been revealed to have crossed boundaries in asymmetrical relationships with their patients that have wreaked havoc in the patient’s lives.  It has been addressed in art – e.g. Alan Rickman’s performance in Seminar presented an All’s Well that Ends Well version of this – darker visions are available and I’m sure many more are waiting in the wings.  The Asymmetry between the two tales in this novel present a range – and both tales hang without conclusion.  We seem even more certain of a tragic ending to she second tale than the first – but we have no reassuring coda to rescue us.

The kid (which is what he was when things went on) at my school did not realize that not only were things wrong but they should be stopped until his own child approached the age he had been when he went through hell.  As he connected with his child, he was able to see that neither he nor any other child deserved to go through what he had.  He reported the teacher to the police, the school board and the superintendent.  Not surprisingly, he, like the Iraqi in Heathrow airport, was himself put on trial – cross examined as if he were a liar intent on doing something nefarious.  The teacher “resigned” the year after the allegations, but there was never a public acknowledgement of what the student (and others) had to survive.  Fortunately he has received a warmer reception on Facebook, but the question of the legacy of the perpetrator is being debated.  No one seems to disagree that his name should be removed from the school, but there are some who believe that all of his good actions were false and existed only to create a façade behind which he could do his evil.  I think it possible that his generative acts – and the ways in which he positively impacted students – need not necessarily be discarded by those who cherish them. 

Halliday ends as she begins, having Ezra solicit a married talk show host who has two children on air with the same “Are you game?” query that started their folly.  She seems to be, at least on one level, sanguine with the idea that Roth/Blazer was who he was (and he, for his part, seems at peace with the end of their affair).  She has been able to gently expose him (as opposed to Roth’s cruel exposure of his psychoanalyst’s faults after his analyst wrote a thinly disguised critical piece about Roth in analysis).  She acknowledges her own activity in the affair and indirectly credits Roth/Blazer with helping her find her voice.  That said, she, unlike my acquaintance, was 26 when she entered a relationship that she, at least on one level, desired and in which there were compensatory asymmetries - and she, unlike her Iraqi counterpart - was not up against multiple states conspiring against her happiness.  We feel her dismay that Roth/Blazer has the time to read lots of other manuscripts, but does not appear to be reading her writing; indeed, she seems to deny herself as a writer even as he keeps insisting that she is one:  he divines that this is who she wants to be and seems to almost force his vision of her as a writer on her – force feeding her writings which end up nourishing not an imitative but ultimately a clear and original voice.  Certainly America and our policies have done good in the world as well as evil, though we have certainly done evil.  How to evaluate the level of the asymmetry and its ultimate outcome is, I think, left to the reader.  Halliday appears to have come to terms with her own asymmetry (but not pretend that this means that she is OK with all asymmetries) and she leaves it up to us to come to terms with ours.     

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