Andrew Smith's Reviews > Asymmetry

Three stories – well two really, one being told in two parts.

1. A young female editor has a sexual relationship with an eminent, ageing writer. We are told little of the woman other than that we directly observe. What we observe is that she seems rather naive and lonely and does little other than meet with the writer, receiving random (and sometimes slightly strange) gifts, and that she also has occasional interactions with an elderly woman who lives in a separate flat in her building. The relationship with the writer does seem to satisfy her even though he’s prone to passing her off to others as anything but his lover. Their discussions are mainly about literature and baseball. The text is interspersed with extracts from various novels.

2. A young man is stranded at a London Airport whilst en route to meet up with his brother in Kurdistan. He has been picked out by officers from Passport Control and is asked questions about his background and his planned journey. We learn that he intended to stop in London for a couple of days to meet with another man before flying on to his final destination. The traveller is an economist and he holds both an American and an Iraqi passport. In flashback, we get to know more of his life in America and also of his time spend in Iraq.

3. The final section picks up the writer from story 1 again. Some years have passed and this time he’s being interviewed for the BBC radio programme Desert Island Discs. In the course of the interview he makes a clumsy but overt pass at the programmes presenter.

The writing here is to be admired: it’s clever, sad and sometimes funny – but always engaging. Story 2 is written in a very different style to the others, but all three sections grabbed me. We are told that the final story is the coda that unites the first two pieces, but this is far from obvious to me. In thinking back on the stories there are certainly some common themes – insecurity and death, for example – but the onus is very much on the reader to draw these out from the text. When I came to the end I was temporarily at a loss: what had I just read and what did it all mean? In truth, I’m still not sure I’ve worked it out.

My thanks to Granta Publications and NetGalley for providing a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.