Katy Waldman, in her New Yorker review of Asymmetry wrote, “[Halliday’s novel]…poses questions about the limits of imagination and empathy—can we understand each other across lines of race, gender, nationality, and power?…[It] begins with Alice, a books editor in her mid-twenties who tumbles into a relationship with a famous writer forty-five years her senior. Ezra Blazer, modelled after Philip Roth (whom the author dated once upon a time, while working at the Wylie agency), is caustic, controlling, and generous. “ Halliday infuses music and the idea of consciousness throughout.

For extra credit reading, in case you can’t get enough of the power dynamic of May-December relationships, pick up the wonderful book by Joyce Maynard, At Home in the World (Picador 1998), one of the rawest and most brilliant memoirs we have read.

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