Asymmetry

The novel is divided into three structurally distinct sections whose connections emerge gradually, raising questions about authorship, empathy, and the limits of imagination.

Part I, "Folly," is set in New York City in the early 2000s. Alice, a 25-year-old editorial assistant at a publishing house called Gryphon, is reading on a park bench when a man with pewter-colored curls and an ice-cream cone sits beside her. She recognizes him as a famous writer but is too startled to speak. Over the next two Sundays they meet on the same bench. On the third, he asks, "Are you game?" and they arrange a Saturday walk. When rain cancels it, the writer invites Alice to his apartment, where a physical relationship begins. His body bears surgical scars; at Alice's office, three National Book Award certificates in his name hang in the lobby. He is gradually revealed to be Ezra Blazer, a celebrated, multiple-Pulitzer Prize-winning author decades her senior.

Ezra establishes rituals and gifts: blackout cookies, bottles of wine he cannot drink because of medication, Chanel perfume, and increasingly large sums of cash. During their eighth encounter, he says "I love you" during sex, then calls the next morning to clarify it was "meant in the moment." Alice begins carrying her phone everywhere, anxious for his calls.

Ezra leaves for the country to finish a draft, giving Alice six hundred dollars for an air conditioner. Alone, she finds her work at Gryphon boring. She sleeps with a colleague; the condom fails, and she visits a clinic for an abortion. She reads voraciously from the books Ezra gives her, including works by Twain, Genet, Camus, and Miller, passages of which are quoted at length throughout Part I, representing her literary education and the solitary hours between his calls.

When Ezra returns, the relationship grows more tender and fragile. His back worsens; he needs another coronary stent, his eighth, and is later fitted with a defibrillator. Alice reads the Holocaust texts he assigns her and begins quietly writing fiction. When Ezra asks what she writes about, she says, "Other people. People more interesting than I am. Muslim hot dog sellers." She confesses that writing about herself "doesn't seem important enough" compared to war and world affairs. Ezra counters: "Importance comes from doing it well." Alice considers "whether a former choirgirl from Massachusetts might be capable of conjuring the consciousness of a Muslim man."

Over successive summers, Alice visits Ezra on Shelter Island under the alias "Samantha Bargeman" so that neighbors and staff will not gossip about her visits. She swims laps in his heated pool, and they share quiet domestic routines. On the eve of the Iraq invasion in March 2003, they watch the president's announcement together. Ezra offers to pay off Alice's remaining college debt, framing it as freeing her to pursue what she truly wants. Driving her to the ferry, he asks, "Is this relationship a little bit heartbreaking?" Alice replies, "Maybe around the edges."

Alice's elderly neighbor Anna knocks on her door with growing frequency, asking for help with light bulbs and the time, often not remembering she visited minutes earlier. Anna's progressive confusion forms a quiet counterpoint to the main narrative. During jury duty, a clerk reads the name "Samantha Bargeman" from a list, a coincidence that stuns Alice. Also called is an absent "Amar Jamali," a name that anticipates Part II. Alice envies him, "desperate as she was to be somewhere else herself. Someone else herself."

The 2004 American League Championship Series, in which the Red Sox come back from a three-games-to-none deficit against the Yankees, provides the dramatic backdrop for the relationship's final stretch. Ezra is in severe pain; they argue. Later, he has chest pains and Alice takes him by taxi to a hospital in Washington Heights. Alice tearfully tells him the relationship is "not good for me right now." Ezra pleads: "Don't leave me. Choose this. Choose the adventure, Alice. This is the adventure. This is the misadventure. This is living." The section ends without resolution.

Part II, "Madness," shifts entirely. Amar Ala Jaafari, an Iraqi-American man arriving at Heathrow Airport from Los Angeles, is questioned by immigration officers. He is en route to Sulaymaniyah in Iraqi Kurdistan to see his brother, with a two-night London stopover to visit his friend Alastair Blunt, a foreign correspondent. The officers confiscate his passport.

In extended flashbacks, Amar recounts his life. Conceived in Baghdad and born on an Iraqi Airways flight over Cape Cod, he grows up in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. His older brother Sami, nine years his senior, discovers piano through one of the building's landlords and becomes obsessively devoted to it. In December 1988, the family visits Baghdad, where Sami predicts Iraq will become glorious again. Sami's engagement to their cousin Rania collapses when Jordanian authorities humiliate her at the border; he enrolls in Baghdad Medical School instead.

Amar attends college, where he falls in love with Maddalena Monti, an actress he accompanies to an abortion. Ambivalent about medical school, he takes a bioethics internship in London, where he befriends Alastair. In December 2003, Amar returns to Baghdad. Sami works at al-Wasati, the only public hospital not plundered after the invasion, treating rocket wounds and burns. At a journalists' Christmas party, Sami challenges Western motives: "Isn't it possible that what the West really wants is simply not to be inconvenienced by the Middle East?" In January 2005, Amar visits Kurdistan for Sami's engagement to Zahra, finding the north strikingly more functional than Baghdad. In a used-piano seller's apartment, Sami quotes a Stephen Crane line the reader recognizes from a note beside Ezra's keyboard in Part I, subtly linking the two narratives. Amar's uncle Zaid urges him to take a job in the Green Zone, Baghdad's fortified government enclave; in 2007, Zaid is kidnapped and killed despite a ransom payment.

Back at Heathrow, Amar is refused entry. Approaching midnight in a detention holding room, the full weight of events settles: his mother has recently been diagnosed with Alzheimer's, and just before leaving Los Angeles, his father told him that Sami has also been kidnapped in Sulaymaniyah. The kidnappers demand a hundred thousand dollars. The section ends with Amar under fluorescent lights, watching It's a Wonderful Life play silently overhead.

Part III, "Ezra Blazer's Desert Island Discs," is a transcript of a BBC Radio 4 interview recorded on February 14, 2011. Ezra selects eight records, a book, and a luxury item to take to a desert island, discussing his childhood in Pittsburgh, his time as a military policeman in postwar Germany, and his marriages. He reveals he has twin children from a French girlfriend he left unknowingly pregnant decades earlier. In the interview's key passage, Ezra references "a young friend of mine" who "has written a rather surprising little novel" about "the extent to which we're able to penetrate the looking-glass and imagine a life, indeed a consciousness, that goes some way to reduce the blind spots in our own." The implication is that Alice is the author of Part II, that she has fulfilled Ezra's challenge to imagine a consciousness beyond her own. Reflecting on love, Ezra calls it a "necessary folly," born of the "mania to tame and possess." The interview closes with Ezra asking the interviewer, echoing his first words to Alice, "Are you game?"