PositiveBookforumAsymmetry, an astonishing debut novel by Lisa Halliday, revisits the early years of the twenty-first century, when the original WMDs were being invoked as reason to invade Iraq ... It’s on a second read that the details of Asymmetry, and its meta-narrative, bloom with intricacy—even the most lightweight and slightly nauseating of minutiae reveal themselves as carefully chosen. Different as Alice and Amar are, their stories echo each other, bringing up the same images and cultural remnants in different contexts, and thereby revealing the inequities at work: The same piece of music will arise, the same speech about Medicare ... The novel never quite equates the geopolitical imbalances of the second half with the unequal romance of the first. Alice’s situation is not at all the same as Iraq’s, and Ezra is kinder, generally, than the US. But our personal lives do pick up the tone of our country’s actions—even our New Year’s resolutions have the mark of the Enlightenment, or of capitalism.
