Imagine a young woman in an asymmetrical relationship with a writer based on Philip Ross. In the stories constructed by male writers, women are clever, well-behaved, and follow the guidance of writers who are both fathers and mentors. Women want to write a story that has nothing to do with their own experiences, but the old writer confidently says that you should start with your own experiences or you are likely to fail.
In the novels of female writers, she fictionalizes a person who has nothing to do with herself. A young white American female assistant editor writes a story about an Iraqi-American male economist.
In the first story, authoritative male writers and young female assistants are asymmetrical between men and women, mentors and students, and the strong and weak in the field of power.
In the second story, an Iraqi-American man who was born on an international flight and has American citizenship lives with his parents in the United States, behaving in the same way as a "new American," but in the shadow of the Iraq War, he is repeatedly questioned by British customs and eventually denied entry. This is the asymmetry between the West and the Middle East, between the center and the periphery of the globalized order, between human beings of different skin colors and ethnic groups.
Imagine these two stories, placed in a book that is not only a writer's book, but also a writer's subtle questioning of the right to speak and the centrality of writing—this is Lisa Halliday's debut novel, Asymmetry.
"Asymmetry"
In 2018, the publication of the English version of the book was hailed by Americans as a "literary event." In the first part of the story, Mary Alice, a 25-year-old white female assistant editor, is picked up on the street by Ezra Bresse, a 70-year-old Pulitzer prize winner and male writer, and then embarks on an underground relationship. The whole story is handled in a calm way, and we know very little about Mary's mental activity, but Ezra's humor, humor, lust, narcissism, aging, and fear of aging can be seen everywhere. This part of the story, partly based on the real experiences of Halliday and Rose, has undergone a lot of artistic processing. The New York Times reported that in her 20s, Halliday worked as an assistant agent for a literary agency, met Philip Rose, and began a romantic relationship. Interestingly, Halliday also showed Ross the novel, to which Rose replied, "It's been a big success. Halliday responds to the novel's relationship to reality: "Of course, some of the details of Alice's life overlap with my own, but many of the plots are fictional. Philip knew best that writing was what it was. ”
At the time of the Metoo Movement, it was also a rhyme between old writers and female literary youth, and Rose was suffering from the accusation of "misogyny", Ross himself wrote a "Dying Body", and once used the love of the old and the young as a guide to expound his understanding of love, death, aging, politics, religion and other issues. Those who hate Rose denounce it as a narcissistic book for male writers, while admirers believe that Rose is not only coldly dissecting others, but also dissecting himself, and he is gazing step by step at how an aging body dies, and the desire for sex finally returns to the peace of life. As Rose himself remarked on Marmaud: "Sadly recording the conflicting human needs, the needs being ruthlessly resisted – and so to speak, indirectly reduced – the blockaded life struggles with the pain, longing for the light, encouragement and a little hope it needs..."
The Dying Flesh
"Asymmetry" can be described as an echo and subversion of "The Dying Flesh". The book caused an uproar as soon as it was published, with The New York Times listing it as one of the top ten books of the year, the Washington Post calling it "an unknown journey down a rabbit hole," and former U.S. President Barack Obama on his annual reading list.
But the novel is also controversial. Many people think that it is not worthy of the name, the social significance is greater than the literary significance, and Douban also has a short review that this novel is "a little better than the average American best-selling novel."
How did the book really look? Why does the same book cause a very different reading experience? With such curiosity, I peruse this asymmetry. And when I read the last part of the novel, this passage of dialogue in the book lingered in my ears:
"Are you writing this?" Our business? ”
"Nothing."
"So what are you writing?"
"The others."
Can we understand each other across the barriers of origin, gender, ethnicity, politics, and national borders? This is the question that Asymmetry really wants to explore, and in order to explore this issue, the author has designed an anonymous documentary novel, a thought novel, and a meta-novel that needs to be understood together by combining the author's experience and the third part of the interview, and the three texts are connected to each other to construct an elaborate puzzle game.
The novel is divided into three parts: Stupid, Crazy, and an interview with Ezra Blazer's Desert Island Records. The first part is the story of the old writer and the young female assistant, the author is based on Philip Ross, and the female assistant is the creator of the second part of the novel. The first part is told from an omniscient perspective combined with the introverted perspective of the female assistant Alice. The narrator does not drag mud and water, she mainly uses action and dialogue when telling the relationship between the two, with a sense of camera switching scene treatment, some parts of which will remind people of Yudora Welty, John Cheever or Raymond Carver.
Lisa Halliday's novel, the first thing that attracted me was the sense of language. Intellectuals are nostalgic and easy to write greasy. The literati's bit of tangerine rotten grain is too greasy to say, especially the literati stories written by male intellectuals, if they become "women all over the world love me", or "the whole world owes me", it is easy to fall into the cliché of the novels of the fallen talents.
Lisa Halliday
Halliday's literati story is not stale, she downplays the literati narcissistic description and replaces it with a calm, scalpel-like narrative tone, like a cool summer night attached to the skin of the novel.
I liked some of the lifelike scenes in the first part:
"On Saturday, it was raining. Alice was sitting on the mosaic tile in the bathroom, struggling to tighten the broken toilet seat with a butter knife when the phone rang: unknown number. ”
She took out her own purse: a heavily worn brown leather men's purse. A scratch card, bought for a dollar, the denomination is also a piece. A lip balm. A comb and a key ring. A card. An automatic pencil. A few coins. Finally there were three tampons, held in the palm of her hand like three bullets. ”
Writing sex is very much to see a writer's knife technique, and looking at a writer's writing sex is also a flattering way to identify excellent writers and mediocre writers (here Haruki Murakami and Jia Pingwa are not convinced). Sex can be written in many ways, from epilepsy and fever attacks like Dostoevsky's vertigo flow (ten pages of philosophical and religious reflections can be derived from male and female sexual affairs), to pink oyster streams like Proust's, like the sick nobles reminiscing about old events in their spring dreams, and to mudslides like Joyce's diary, but the most important thing is to use a bunch of clichés to describe a narcissistic sex. "Asymmetry" can be called "after-the-fact flow", it writes about sex, but it mainly writes about "after sex" or "sexual intermission".
Again, they did everything they had to do and didn't mess up the bed.
Through the sweater, he placed his hands on each of her breasts, as if pressing her mute button.
"This one's a little bigger."
"Oh." Alice looked down unhappily.
"No, no, it's not a flaw. There is no such thing as perfect symmetry. ”
"Like snowflakes?" Alice tried to give an example.
"It's like snowflakes." He agreed.
A pink scar stretched up his stomach to his sternum, like a zipper. Another scar split his leg in two, from the groin to his ankle. Two more scars formed a faint scent above his ass. And that's just positive.
The story of old writers and young white women is easy to write frivolous and narcissistic, but Asymmetry is handled neither frivolously nor shallowly, with a sense of just right proportion, and the basis of this sense of proportion is that the author Lisa Halliday takes her characters seriously, whether it is an old writer or a female editor, she does not glorify or ugly, but matches them with the right tone. The meaning of this novel is secondary, and the most fascinating thing is its tone, a tone of immersion in which one pulls out to look at himself. This actually reminds me of "Room by the Sea" I read last year.
In the first story, when Alice is found secretly writing by Ezra and perfunctorily says that her protagonist is just a Muslim peddler selling hot dogs on the street, it is easy for anxious readers to ignore such details, but the reader who remembers, as long as he reads the identity of the protagonist in the second part, will suddenly realize that the writer wrote not at all the clichéd old writer and little girl love story, but through the way of nested novels, to explore two questions that seem to have no answers and always bother us -
1. Is it possible for asymmetrical people to truly understand each other?
2) When we realize the ubiquity of asymmetry in the world, how do we coexist with asymmetry, and how do we face the tendency to self-condemnation due to weak willpower?
Writing is Alice's secret rebellion against Ezra. The second story is a slap in the face of the old writer's conception, and Alice's attempt to prove that it is possible for one person to understand the situation of another person, even if it is a complete stranger to her.
However, the end of the second story makes this understanding move towards a deeper suspension - when the Iraqis who look like the second generation of American citizens are still detained by British customs because of their birth and skin color, when the huge asymmetry is still hidden in the discourse of globalization and universal values, how many indelible blood-colored dark marks are hidden under the tolerance and understanding advocated by neoliberal globalization?
This is a surging text. The first text has the feeling of Monroe, not hurried, not slow, hidden the blade, seemingly making the female image thin, in fact, hiding a small incision, leaving the sensitive person to observe the raging dark river. The second story, the budding calf is not afraid of the tiger's brushstrokes, is visible good, the layout of the plot is exquisite, from the character design to the narrative advancement, it reveals the ambition of the narrator. It's a race for narrative power, a secret battle between authority and challengers.
Ezra and Alice, the tension of their relationship is that they are not only the counterparts in the power relationship, the emotional relationship, but also the mutual look of the elderly and the youth. In an interview, Ezra mentioned that he and every object of appointment are like "adopted daughters", and his desire for control is hidden in the gentleman's love words and sweet teachings. Interestingly, the more Ezra warned Alice not to write anything, the more Alice wrote about her story. For example, he warns Alice not to discuss politics and not to write about characters she is not familiar with, but the second story is precisely about politics, a subject that Alice does not seem to empathize with.
The more Ezra shows his control, the more it reflects his aging and physical decay. Their lovemaking is very sad, even if it is a romantic and tacit coincidence, there is a feeling of imminent separation and sadness. Even if it is two people who are in tacit understanding, there are gullies that the other cannot observe.
Ezra's relationship with Alice is not just about possessing and being possessed, in fact, they are both watching each other, both gazing at each other's vulnerability. They actually love themselves more than they love others, admit their selfishness, sensitivity, disguise, double standards, fear of being disturbed, and hope that others will set their sights on themselves. They are mirrors, specimens, mentors, and a miniature capsule of observing each other's asymmetry.
They are all self-exploring, and they are all sensitive to the seemingly ordinary and sharp details of everyday life.
For example, Alice:
One night at a party, an editor's retirement farewell party, after which she slept with an assistant in the copyright department. They did use condoms, but it stayed inside Alice when it came out and didn't come out. ..."Where did it go?" Alice asked, looking down at the dark canyon between the two of them. Her voice sounded childish and innocent, as if it were just a magic trick, and he would conjure up a fresh condom from her ears at any moment.
However, the person who completed the magic was herself—alone in the bathroom, holding her breath with one foot on the toilet seat of the new joy. It wasn't an easy task, drawing your fingers around in the slippery, swollen depths. Later, though she knew that this would not eliminate all the terrible possibilities, she lay down in the bathtub and washed herself with the hottest water she could bear.
What I have recalled repeatedly is alice's observation of herself, as well as the author's observation of women's bodies and women's life course through the information alice sees. It is a kind of everyday wear and tear and violence that is ignored by the grand historical narrative but is specifically present in every woman's life.
As mentioned in the book, the Nobel Prize was awarded to Keltais Imre, saying that he "insisted on writing the fragile experience of the individual in order to counter the barbarism and arbitrariness of history." ”
So, the novel deliberately spent a page and a half depicting the process of women removing embryos in great detail. And this is one of the things that men often overlook, the asymmetry of men's and women's daily experiences - the asymmetry of the perception of pain, the asymmetry of the definition of grandeur and smallness, and even the asymmetry of literary writing and historical narrative based on different identities, which aggravates the prejudice, tearing, and even self-talk atmosphere of the individual cognitive world, but the destruction of this atmosphere is not to establish a unified concept, but to return to the "different" view, the tolerance of "asymmetry".
Among them, the emphasis on "feeling" and "empathy" in literature and even in the entire field of humanities, and even "logic", "independent thinking", and "the ability to criticize and introspect" (many people think that literature is perceptual, but art is often a combination of sensibility and reason), are very important but increasingly lacking qualities in public discussion.
"Asymmetry" reveals small ingenuity everywhere, if we take the cover design as part of the creation, then from the cover of "Asymmetry", to the catalog, to the narrative and character transformation of the characters, in fact, there is an asymmetry of cleverness. For example, in the third part of the book, Ezra is interviewed and thinks that it is too deliberate to "wedge into each other's lives" of the novel characters, it is better to let them go parallel, we sneak into the lives of others through imagination, beyond "birth, privilege, innocence", and when Ezra and Alice are actually together, he does not really transcend privilege or really understand Alice's desire to write, but desires to control and shape a Alice in his own mind.
And Amar Jamali, who left his post in the first part, actually has a subtle connection with the narrator of the second part, "Amar". Some of the self-dissecting sentences of the second part are not pointing to Alice in the first part, or even to the author himself:
Even those who survive by imagination will be trapped forever by an ultimate limitation: she can look the mirror at any chosen object, at any angle she likes—she can even lift the mirror and prevent it from shining on herself in order to better narcissize—but she can't avoid the fact that she is always the one holding the mirror. And just because you can't see yourself in the mirror doesn't mean that others can't see you.
So, it's a novel full of little ingenuity, and the author uses the brushwork of the grass snake gray line to depict the ubiquitous asymmetry around us, but in the end, the book is more like a mirror, shining on ourselves that we may not be completely sure of.
Alice's game with Ezra is both a literary process of killing her father and liberation, and a proof that she rubs the fire of creation in a depressed situation. This kind of secret, taboo, and hidden relationship is not only repressive, but also for her, there is actually a taste of dark competition. So, it's a novel that's always stuck in a fog, and it has a hitting temptation for this type of person, but for readers who don't like the style and feel that the author's design is too blunt and ambitious, they may only read from Asymmetry to be bored and uncomfortable.
At the end of the day, the feedback generated by the book is also part of the asymmetry. And what we can do is not to make the other person accept ourselves, but to understand but not succumb to this difference and asymmetrical world.