On Asymmetry

The first book I read in 2019 was Lisa Halliday’s Asymmetry. It was one of those buzzy novels I’d been vaguely meaning to read for several months; after it landed on a number of year-end “best books of the year” lists, I added it to my Christmas list and promptly devoured it as 2018 turned into 2019.

Almost every review of the book mentions two elements: its display of the craft of writing — the skill of constructing a tight story, piece by piece — and its exploration of the possibilities and limitations of empathy. The book is especially masterful in its subtle exploration of the role of the writer. Even before I figured out the book’s central conceit, though, I was already struck by how it was making me think about the role of the reader. I’m the first to admit that I can be guilty of gravitating towards books with protagonists that seem like me. Novels about young women who live in coastal cities and work in publishing, the arts, or some other “creative” field (generally enabled by their upper-middle class, highly educated background) are embarrassingly overrepresented on my bookshelf. So, when I read the blurb on the back of Asymmetry — “The first section, ‘Folly,’ tells the story of Alice, a young American editor, and her relationship with the famous and much older Ezra Blazer. ‘Madness’ is narrated by Amar, an Iraqi-American man who, on his way to visit his brother in Kurdistan, is detained by immigration officers and spends the last weekend of 2008 in a holding room in Heathrow.” — I expected the first part of the book to be the easier read, partially because it felt like a familiar story.

But from the moment I flipped the page and started “Madness,” I was hooked. Amar’s voice was instantly easy to relate to, and it guided me straight into his world. From his descriptions of the apartment in which he’d grown up in America to the observations of the holding room in which he now found himself and the passages detailing a visit to Iraq, I felt like I was right there with him. I was at my parents’ house for the holidays while I read Asymmetry, and I had a throwback to childhood as I found myself pulled out of total immersion in the book for family dinner, sitting mostly silently through the meal as I reacclimated after my trip to Iraq with Amar.

The book’s third act reveals Halliday’s trick: we realize that Amar is Alice’s creation, the protagonist of the book she wrote after her relationship with Blazer ended and she pursued her desire to be a writer in her own right. Whereas the section focused on Alice gives us little insight into her character, or even much about her life outside of her relationship with Blazer, the voice she creates for Amar lets us get to know his memories, doubts, reflections. The questions this raises are intriguing: what does it mean that Alice’s experiences in many ways mirror the author’s own (Halliday worked in publishing and had a relationship with Philip Roth in her twenties), while Amar’s story plays out largely in a country where the author has apparently never even visited? Halliday is using this structure to meditate on the purpose of writing — and, in particular, whether authors should write only what they know, or use their work to explore other voices and worlds. But the book’s coda also made me think about the purpose of reading, and the fact that I empathized so much more with Amar, not yet realizing he was Alice’s creation.

“EMPATHIZE MODE” AND THE PROVENANCE OF PERSPECTIVES

In many ways, Asymmetry is a perfect book to have started 2019 with, because it’s an entry point to questions I’ve been mulling around fiction as a mode of engaging with the real world. One question I keep coming back to is whether and how reading fiction builds empathy. From what I can tell, the research on this is fuzzy, but it feels like it should build empathy, right? I’ve always felt that the experience of immersing myself in someone else’s perspective for an hour or a week is like using a muscle, one that I (hopefully) use to understand the non-fictional characters I come across in my life, too. I still think that, but Asymmetry complicates the story a bit, just by subverting our assumptions about the provenance of the perspectives we’re stepping into.

In the weeks since I finished the book, I’ve also been connecting my reflections on it to conversations in the social impact sector, which is one of my professional homes. In recent years, the rise of design thinking has helped make the idea of empathy go viral, with everything from digital product development to nonprofit logic models drawing from a process that starts with gaining empathy for customers, users, others. Design thinking has a lot of value, but, like anything that’s been thoroughly hyped, it’s also drawn some criticism. A recent Harvard Business Review article, for example, called design thinking “fundamentally conservative,” largely in centering the designer; “because the designer herself generates the tacit understandings she uses by connecting empathetically with potential users — the ‘empathize’ mode — whatever needs of product users and communities she perceives are refracted through her personal experience and priorities,” writes author Natasha Iskander. Much like the uneven power dynamics that Asymmetry explores — young woman and famous older man, Iraq and America, even author and character — there’s a power dynamic at play here, too; the designer (or startup founder, or well-meaning social impact leader) is in some sense the author, putting together pieces to construct a persona and a narrative.

Iskander and other critics have suggested that this process also limits challenges to the status quo: empathy exercises like user interviews lend themselves to solutions that lessen pain points or make improvements within existing systems, rather than rethinking the systems themselves. In my roles working with college students, I’ve heard teams mention that they’ve “gained empathy” after a few brief user interviews; like clockwork, they turn their insights from this tidy empathy experience into a new feature or yet another app. It makes me wonder if my own self-satisfaction about gaining empathy through reading is so different — do I go into “empathize mode” for the time it takes me to read a book, just to move on to the next thing after the last page? How can reading a book be an entry point to more radical, applied empathy, the kind that might prompt you to engage more deeply with a community or to question an existing structure?

This last question is one of the core questions that will be guiding my Book Report Project experiment this year. I’m hoping I’ll finish each book I read less with a lesson than with a challenge, and Asymmetry presented that challenge outright by strategically complicating my assumptions about perspective and empathy. In the art-meets-social-impact field I often work in, the friction between one’s own creative vision and the real thoughts and experiences of others (a friction that is frequently touched on in Asymmetry, from Blazer telling Alice not to sentimentalize a homeless man in their neighborhood to a British journalist describing how spending time in the Middle East makes it harder to write the straightforward narratives editors want) shows up constantly, in ways big and small. In the weeks since I finished the book, I’ve found myself reading guides like this one on thoughtfully positioning yourself when taking on a creative project for social impact, and talking with colleagues about acknowledging and subverting the power asymmetries in our own work. I don’t know where this exploration will take me, but with Asymmetry as a jumping-off point, I’m hoping to orient my work toward more complex narratives, more questioning, and more room for meaningful surprise.