Lisa Halliday

I am nonplussed by this book. I liked the first part very much, though despite its length, it has the characteristics of short stories that I dislike: It seemed fragmentary, a vignette, lacking the development of plot or of characters that novels offer. I wouldn’t have caught on to how the three parts relate to one another if not for the “book club” questions at the end of my e-book edition. And while that seems like an intellectually clever little trick, for me it lacked the emotional show more resonance that would have given it substance and made it transcend being anything but a clever device. I am puzzled about what some readers seem to find so thought-provoking about it. I’m left feeling that I missed something very significant that would have given this book more weight if I caught it. show less

"Some of us wage wars. Others write books. The most delusional ones write books. We have very little choice other than to spend our waking hours trying to sort out and make sense of the perennial pandemonium. To forge patterns and proportions where they don’t actually exist..."

This is an inventive, offbeat novel, that is broken up into 3 sections. The first is a quirky, May-September romance and the second focuses on an Iraqi-American man , being unfairly detained at Heathrow Airport. The show more similarities slowly begin to reveal themselves, as the narrative advances and it becomes even more interesting, during the unexpected coda.
Obviously this one, is not for everyone, and that is reflected in the mixed reviews it has received. It did work for me and I did admire this author's ambition and craftsmanship. A talent to watch. show less

This debut novel by Lisa Halliday is broken into three parts that may or may not be connected. She had a relationship with Philip Roth when she was in her twenties and it is hard to read the book without referring to that romance. There is much to admire in her writing. I especially enjoyed this philosophy a character explains during an interview passage. “It’s human nature to try to impose order and form on even the most defiantly chaotic and amorphous stuff of life. Some of us do it by show more drafting laws, or by painting lines on the road, or by damming rivers or isolating isotopes or building better bra. Some of us wage wars. Others write books." show less

That now-old generation of patronizingly sexist and overbearing celebrated male authors gets a mostly tender jabbing here from Halliday, who wryly draws upon her real life “Folly” of sharing Phillip Roth’s bed to sketch out a young blank page of a woman following wherever The Famous One decrepitly leads. She’s kind to herself, and to him, which helps create sympathy for a first-half protagonist who doesn’t demonstrate a great deal of personal agency.

Halliday’s second-half is a show more clever turn about, fully revealed in a brief ending coda, which now serves up The Famous One without the filter of an underdeveloped pair of rose colored glasses. show less