annethology
  • Home
    • About me >
      • A little more about me
    • About my books
    • Author talks
    • Contact me
    • Sign up for my newsletter
    • Privacy
  • Annecdotal
  • Articles
    • Print journalism
    • Where psychology meets fiction
  • Sugar and Snails
    • Acknowledgements
    • Blog tour, Q&A's and feature articles >
      • Birthday blog tour
    • Early endorsements
    • Events >
      • Launch photos
      • Launch party videos
    • in pictures
    • Media
    • If you've read the book
    • Playlist
    • Polari
    • Reading group questions
    • Reviews
    • In the media
  • Underneath
    • Endorsements and reviews
    • Launch party and events
    • Musical accompaniment
    • Pictures
    • Questions for book groups
    • The stories underneath the novel
  • Short stories
    • Becoming Someone (anthology) >
      • Becoming Someone (video readings)
    • Print and downloads
    • Read it online
    • Quick reads
    • Virtual annethologies
  • Reading and reviews
    • Themed quotes
    • Reviews A to H
    • Reviews I to M
    • Reviews N to Z
    • Fictional therapists
    • Nonfiction
    • Debut novelists >
      • 2013 >
        • Shelley Harris
        • Claire King
        • Harriet Lane
        • Alison Moore
        • Anthea Nicholson
        • Susie Nott-Bower
        • Charlotte Rogan
        • Gavin Weston
      • 2014 >
        • Carys Bray
        • Emma Chapman
        • Emma Healey
        • Johanna Lane
        • Mary Costello
        • Audrey Magee
        • Kathryn Simmonds
        • Aria Beth Sloss
      • 2015 >
        • Sarah Armstrong
        • Claire Fuller
        • Peyton Marshall
        • Gavin McCrea
        • Lisa McInerney
        • Jamie Mollart
        • Anna Smaill
        • Fleur Smithwick
        • Philip Teir
    • Reading around the world

In a word: Asymmetry & Magnetism

18/3/2018

2 Comments

 
I couldn’t resist pairing these recently published, unconventionally structured, debut novels about relationships: their intriguing one-word titles are almost interchangeable, with Alice in Asymmetry magnetically drawn to (and later repulsed by) her much older lover and the mother-daughter relationship explored in Magnetism inherently asymmetrical. My reading experience of both was mixed, strongly engaging with the second halves significantly more than the first. See what you think.

Picture
Picture

Asymmetry by Lisa Halliday

Alice sits on a bench in a New York park struggling with the book on her lap. She is in her early twenties, the dogsbody in a publishing house, although she seems younger: perhaps because in the opening paragraph she’s channelling her namesake in Wonderland; perhaps in contrast to the much older man with whom she is about to embark on an affair.
 
En route to Kurdistan to check up on the disappearance of his brother, Amar has a stopover in London, to catch up with an old friend. But at passport control at Heathrow, the Iraqi-American economist is asked to step aside for further questioning. Amid bureaucracy’s frustrating delays, he has time to reflect on his life to date and the hostility between the two nations to which he belongs.
 
Ezra Blazer, the eminent writer who took a seat beside Alice on the first page, is interviewed about his life and music choices on the long-running BBC Radio 4 programme Desert Island Discs.
 
How do these three strands, unfolding sequentially, fit together? With fine writing, moments of connection between the three disparate narratives, and a whimsical beginning and end, Asymmetry is certainly unusual, but is it, as the blurb asserts, “a piece of shapeshifting brilliance” or a couple of novellas, with a short story in the form of an interview tucked in at the end? Does it challenge “the power plays and imbalances of contemporary life” or self-consciously draw attention to what many novels do: embracing the contrasts and conflicts that can make fiction more interesting than ordinary life? As Amar says, “It’s nothing new, disunity” (p237).
 
Amar’s thread was beautifully realised, and the most interesting for me of the three. How far can we trust our memories? How do we accommodate contradictions within ourselves? Or between our sense of who we are and the perceptions of others, especially if we’re regarded with suspicion by those in power? There’s also lots of asymmetry in the story of the unlikely lovers, not only in the half-century age difference, but in wealth (Ezra gives Alice money for, among other things, an air conditioning unit and a winter coat, obviously not at the same time), experience (Ezra guides her reading, and Alice shares passages with the reader ranging from Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to Holocaust accounts) and literary success (he a famous writer, albeit repeatedly missing out on the Nobel Prize; she with a boring job and writing aspirations of her own). But more disturbing is the power imbalance: I was desperate for Alice to leave the man who refuses to use a condom and controls their meetings with his phone calls signalled by CALLER ID BLOCKED.
 
Asymmetry is a literary debut that has already won the author a prestigious prize (Whiting Award) and will probably go on to win more. Thanks to Granta books for my review copy. For other recent reads about writers and writing, see last November’s post,
Two novels about writers and the real-life characters who get beneath their skin. For a range of novels about music, see this thread.

Magnetism by Ruth Figgest

This story of over fifty years of an enmeshed mother-daughter relationship unfolds mostly in reverse. Beginning with a scene in 1976, when the sixteen-year-old daughter is on a psychiatric ward, we move to the end of the relationship in 2013, when the daughter gets a phone call at work to say her mother has died, to travel back in time towards the secret painful root of this unhappy family.
 
The first half of the novel focuses on the adult relationship between the women and their mutual attraction and repulsion. Their care for each other is contaminated by an urge to criticise and control. Both single when we first meet them, the mother a widow and the daughter a divorcee, we follow them through unsatisfactory affairs and a fair few medical interventions, including plastic surgery, one of the few lessons the mother has bequeathed the daughter being an anxiety about her appearance. Neither seems content although, as the more flamboyant, the mother seems better able to strive for what she wants.
 
I imagine many readers would recognise their own mother-daughter frustrations in the characters, which might be the source of the humour alluded to in the blurb, although I’m afraid it bypassed me. I much preferred the second half in which the daughter’s understated voice comes into its own, with a terrible poignancy in her attempt to gloss over unpalatable truths about the family, much as her mother has taught her to do. Although the reader is left to draw her own conclusions, this denial seems to have precipitated her hospital admission. (Incidentally, I thought the author’s decision to give both women a psychiatric diagnosis plausible but unnecessary. Their disturbance easily speaks for itself.)
 
The mother’s plight is extremely cleverly conveyed through the daughter’s account. Typical of her generation, she has expected to find fulfilment through marriage and, her exposure to “women’s lib” arriving too late, lacks the skills or supports to manage her disappointment when it fails to meet her expectations. In this I was reminded of
The Autobiography of Us, and so wished the family could have had a compassionate “elder” to take care of them all. Equally moving is the daughter’s potential and earnestness as a child that the reader already knows will be unfulfilled, as well as a traumatic hospitalisation for an unspecified physical health issue at the age of eight.
 
If that comes across as too miserable, there is hope at the end that the daughter finds some strength in facing up to the truth after her mother’s death. Given my contrasting experiences of the first and second halves, it is difficult for me to summarise this novel; let’s say that it is, in part,
an insightful and poignant portrayal of the all too common way in which parent-child relationships can disappoint, despite the best intentions of all concerned. Thanks to Myriad Editions for my review copy. For another novel told in reverse, this time exploring a long marriage, see Wait For Me, Jack.
 
Single-word titles are not unusual in fiction. So far this year I’ve reviewed
Kintu, Sight, Consent and Upstate – and I’m grabbing this opportunity to remind readers of my own novel, Underneath. Listing them here has got me wondering about the balance between intriguing and teasing in such titles. What do you think?
Picture
Thanks for reading. I'd love to know what you think. If you've enjoyed this post, you might like to sign up via the sidebar for regular email updates and/or my quarterly Newsletter.
2 Comments
Norah Colvin link
25/3/2018 12:13:56 pm

An interesting pair, and pairing, of books, Anne. They both sound like worthy reads. I find it difficult to imagine a fifty year age gap. It's even more than most parent and child and closer to grandparent and child age differences. I was interested to hear your thoughts about the three characters and their intersecting stories, with regards to something of my own I am contemplating, and something of another I am reading. Good food for thought. Thanks.

Reply
Annecdotist
26/3/2018 01:58:28 pm

Norah, you caught my attention with something of my own I’m contemplating and will be interested to see how that develops.

Reply



Leave a Reply.

    Picture
    Picture
    Picture
    Picture
    Annecdotal is where real life brushes up against the fictional.  
    Picture
    Annecdotist is the blogging persona of Anne Goodwin: 
    reader, writer,

    slug-slayer, tramper of moors, 
    recovering psychologist, 
    struggling soprano, 
    author of two novels.

    Picture
    My second novel published May 2017.
    Picture
    Picture
    My debut novel shortlisted for Polari First Book Prize
    Picture
    LATEST POSTS HERE
    I don't post to a schedule, but average  around ten reviews a month (see here for an alphabetical list), 
    some linked to a weekly flash fiction, plus posts on writing and my journey to publication and beyond.  
    Your comments are welcome any time any where.

    Get new posts direct to your inbox ...

    Enter your email address:

    or click here …

    RSS Feed


    Subscribe to my newsletter for updates 3-4 times a year.
    Picture
    Picture

    2019 Reading Challenge

    2019 Reading Challenge
    Anne has read 19 books toward their goal of 100 books.
    hide
    19 of 100 (19%)
    view books
    Picture
    Picture
    Picture
    Tweets by @Annecdotist
    Picture
    Picture
    Read No Flowers by Request my latest short story hot off the press.
    Picture

    Popular posts

    • Compassion: something we all need
    • Do spoilers spoil?
    • How to create a convincing fictional therapist
    • Instructions for a novel
    • Looking at difference, embracing diversity
    • Never let me go: the dilemma of lending books
    • On loving, hating and writers’ block
      On Pop, Pirates and Plagiarism
    • READIN' for HER reviews
    • Relishing the cuts
    • The fast first draft
    • The tragedy of obedience
    • Writers and therapy: a love-hate relationship?
    Looking for something in particular? Sorry the blog has no search facility, but typing Annecdotal plus the keyword into Google usually works.
    Or try one of these:

    Categories/Tags

    All
    Animals
    Annecdotist Hosts
    Annecdotist On Tour
    Articles
    Attachment Theory
    Author Interviews
    Becoming Someone
    Being A Writer
    Blogging
    Bodies
    Body
    Books For Writers
    Bookshops
    CB Book Group
    Character
    Childhood
    Christmas
    Classics
    Closure
    Coming Of Age
    Counsellors Cafe
    Creative Writing Industry
    Creativity
    Debut Novels
    Disability
    Editing
    Emotion
    Ethics
    Ethis
    Family
    Feedback And Critiques
    Fictional Psychologists & Therapists
    Food
    Friendship
    Futuristic
    Gender
    Genre
    Getting Published
    Giveaways
    Good Enough
    Grammar
    Gratitude
    Group/organisational Dynamics
    History
    Humour
    Identity
    Illness
    Independent Presses
    Institutions
    International Commemorative Day
    Jane Eyre
    Language
    LGBTQ
    Libraries
    Live Events
    Marketing
    Memoir
    Memory
    Mental Health
    Microfiction
    Motivation
    Music
    Names
    Narrative Voice
    Nature / Gardening
    Networking
    Newcastle
    Nonfiction
    Nottingham
    Novels
    Peak District
    Poetry
    Point Of View
    Politics
    Politics Current Affairs
    Presentation
    Privacy
    Prizes
    Psychoanalytic Theory
    Psychology
    Psycholoists Write
    Psychotherapy
    Race
    Racism
    Rants
    Reading
    Real Vs Imaginary
    Religion
    Repetitive Strain Injury
    Research
    Reviewing
    Romance
    Satire
    Second Novels
    Settings
    Sex
    Shakespeare
    Short Stories General
    Short Stories My Published
    Short Stories Others'
    Siblings
    Snowflake
    Storytelling
    Structure
    Sugar And Snails
    Technology
    The
    Therapy
    Tourism
    Transfiction
    Translation
    Trauma
    Unconscious
    Unconscious, The
    Underneath
    Voice Recognition Software
    War
    WaSBihC
    Weather
    Work
    Writing Process
    Writing Technique

    Archives

    February 2019
    January 2019
    December 2018
    November 2018
    October 2018
    September 2018
    August 2018
    July 2018
    June 2018
    May 2018
    April 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    January 2018
    December 2017
    November 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017
    August 2017
    July 2017
    June 2017
    May 2017
    April 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    October 2016
    September 2016
    August 2016
    July 2016
    June 2016
    May 2016
    April 2016
    March 2016
    February 2016
    January 2016
    December 2015
    November 2015
    October 2015
    September 2015
    August 2015
    July 2015
    June 2015
    May 2015
    April 2015
    March 2015
    February 2015
    January 2015
    December 2014
    November 2014
    October 2014
    September 2014
    August 2014
    July 2014
    June 2014
    May 2014
    April 2014
    March 2014
    February 2014
    January 2014
    December 2013
    November 2013
    October 2013
    September 2013
    August 2013
    July 2013
    June 2013
    May 2013
    April 2013
    March 2013
    February 2013
    January 2013

    Picture
    Picture
    BLOGGING COMMUNITIES
    Picture
    Picture
    Picture
    I'm honoured to receive these blog awards:
    Picture
    Picture
    Picture
    Picture
    but no more, thanks, your comments are awesome enough
Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.
Photos used under Creative Commons from havens.michael34, romana klee, mrsdkrebs, Kyle Taylor, Dream It. Do It., adam & lucy, dluders, Joybot, Hammer51012, jorgempf, Sherif Salama, eyspahn, raniel diaz, E. E. Piphanies, scaredofbabies, Nomadic Lass, paulternate, Tony Fischer Photography, archer10 (Dennis), slightly everything, impbox, jonwick04, country_boy_shane, dok1, Out.of.Focus, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service - Midwest Region, Elvert Barnes, guillenperez, Richard Perry, jamesnaruke, Juan Carlos Arniz Sanz, El Tuerto, kona99, maveric2003, !anaughty!, Patrick Denker, David Davies, hamilcar_south, idleformat, Dave Goodman, Sharon Mollerus, photosteve101, La Citta Vita, A Girl With Tea, striatic, carlosfpardo, Damork, Elvert Barnes, UNE Photos, jurvetson, quinn.anya, BChristensen93, Joelk75, ashesmonroe, albertogp123, >littleyiye<, mudgalbharat, Swami Stream, Dicemanic, lovelihood, anyjazz65, Tjeerd, albastrica mititica, jimmiehomeschoolmom