Asymmetry - Lisa Halliday Page 0,86

hood riffling a little whenever she exhaled or blew her nose. My own coat was in my suitcase, rolled up between a pair of hiking boots and a toy abacus. All I had on me now was the light parka in which I’d departed Los Angeles twenty-three hours earlier, anticipating a tomorrow very different from today. In West Hollywood, it had been fifty-six degrees—not exactly springlike but still mild enough that on my way home from a farewell meeting with my dissertation advisor I’d decided to sit down outside the café at the end of my road and order a plate of eggs. I’d had a book with me, the same book on post-Keynesian price theory I’m not reading now, and after ordering my brunch and checking in for my flight I’d opened it up and read with a highly tenuous concentration until my five dollars of freshly squeezed sanguinello arrived and I drank it down all at once. The juice was pulpy and sweet and the words on the page looked denser and farther away after that. High in the sky an afternoon moon threw back the light of the sun. Then my phone beeped, the screen flashing PARENTS; then it beeped again, and this time Maddie left me a message saying Merry Christmas, inshallah; then it beeped a third time, just as a basket of bread and jam was set down by my elbow, and as I listened to my father tell me what Zahra had told him only half an hour before I laid down my knife and watched the traffic on Beverly Boulevard fleeting west. It was SUVs, mostly, SUVs plus the odd old hatchback or sedan; there was also a white stretch limo, a van painted to look like a shark, and a gleaming red fire truck leisurely trailing an American flag. They’ve asked for a hundred thousand, my father told me, through tears. Hassan’s offered seventy-five. Approaching their own reflections in the open window opposite my chair the vehicles appeared to drive into themselves, to glide eastward and westward at once—their hoods and wheels and windshields to disappear into antimatter, the flag to devour itself.

III

EZRA BLAZER’S DESERT ISLAND DISCS

[recorded at BBC Broadcasting House in London on February 14, 2011]

INTERVIEWER: My castaway this week is a writer. A clever boy originally from the Squirrel Hill neighborhood of East Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, he graduated from Allegheny College swiftly into the pages of Playboy, The New Yorker, and The Paris Review, where his short stories about postwar working-class Americans earned him a reputation as a fiercely candid and unconventional talent. By the time he was twenty-nine, he had published his first novel, Nine Mile Run, which won him the first of three National Book Awards; since then he’s published twenty more books, and received dozens more awards, including the Pen/Faulkner Award, a Gold Medal in Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, two Pulitzer Prizes, the National Medal of Arts, and, just this past December—“for his exuberant ingenuity and exquisite powers of ventriloquism, which with irony and compassion evince the extraordinary heterogeneity of modern American life”—literature’s most coveted honor: the Nobel Prize. Widely admired in the States as well as here in the UK and abroad, he’s been translated into more than thirty languages—and yet, off the page, he remains a recluse, preferring the sanctity of his longtime residence on the eastern end of Long Island to what he calls the “fatal froth and frenzy” of Manhattan literary life. “Be audacious in your writing,” he says, “and conservative in your days.” He is Ezra Blazer.

Are we to take it from that, Ezra Blazer, that the decidedly unconventional protagonists in your novels are entirely the products of a wild imagination?

EZRA BLAZER: [Laughs.] If only my imagination were so wild. No. Certainly not. And yet it would be equally wrong to call them autobiographical, or to become caught up in that inane exercise of trying to separate “truth” from “fiction,” as if those boxes weren’t kicked aside by the novelist for good reason to begin with.

INTERVIEWER: And what reason is that?

EZRA BLAZER: Our memories are no more reliable than our imaginations, after all. But I’m the first to admit it can be irresistible, contemplating what’s “real” versus “imagined” in a novel. Checking for seams, trying to figure out how it’s been done. It’s as old as time, this practice of dishing out advice you don’t always follow yourself. “Be audacious in your hieroglyphs, conservative in your hunting and