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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