Publication of a debut novel is an experience comparable with the birth of a first child. Literary gestation is normally a longer process, and delivery of a book is more deeply fraught. Here is some evidence that the labour can be worthwhile.
Asymmetry (Granta, £14.99) by Lisa Halliday, a young American now living in Milan, is a lopsided triptych of admirable erudition and stylishness — in effect, two novellas and a short story: a Manhattan romance, an Iraqi reminiscence of the devastation of Baghdad, and a BBC interview on Desert Island Discs.
In the initial, most enjoyable episode, Alice, an assistant editor of a New York publishing house, would like to move to Europe to write. In the meantime, how-ever, as an attractive 25-year-old of advanced intelligence, she happily succumbs to the blandishments of a ‘much older’ man she recognises as Ezra Blazer, a novelist of international renown. He is charming, rich, generous and still virile. She winsomely calls him a ‘cradle robber,’ and he equally unreproachfully calls her a ‘grave robber’.
They get along together just fine, even though his bathroom is a pharmacopoeia of painkillers for his backache. Halliday is moved to medical prolixity, and there are more surgical details of abortion than many readers will welcome. But Ezra, recalling advice he gave to a creative writing class in the past, tells Alice it is detail that ‘brings fiction to life’; and Halliday dispenses information in profusion and colour on a wide range of subjects — from love to classical music, delicatessen cuisine and the psychological effects of being detained at Heathrow for investigation of eligibility to enter the United Kingdom.
A Kind of Freedom by Margaret Wilkerson Sexton (JM Originals, £10.99) is an insider’s intimate account of how ‘people of colour’ in New Orleans struggle against white bigots and among themselves in attempts to achieve social evolution.
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