A Novel That Resists Being Filmed, and a Star Who Doesn't Care

When I first read Asymmetry — Lisa Halliday's strange, precise, formally daring debut from 2018 — I remember thinking that it was one of those books that explained itself against adaptation. Not because of its prose style, exactly, but because of its structure. Two seemingly unrelated sections: the first, a love story between a young American woman named Alice and an elderly novelist named Ezra Blazer; the second, an Iraqi-American man stranded in a Heathrow interrogation room. The whole architecture of the novel asks you to hold two very different kinds of attention simultaneously, then quietly suggests they were never separate to begin with. Richard Gere, it has now been confirmed, will play Ezra Blazer. On one level, this is obvious casting: Gere is 77, elegant, an actor who has always understood the particular aesthetics of American decline and beauty. Ezra Blazer — modeled, everyone assumed, in some significant degree on Philip Roth — is the kind of role that demands exactly that combination of charisma and moral ambiguity. On another level, I find myself wondering what Halliday thinks, sitting somewhere with this news. Asymmetry is not a book about Philip Roth, but it is a book that knew Philip Roth, in the biographical sense, which adds a layer of irony that the novel itself would probably appreciate. Roth died in 2018, the same year the book came out. The fictional Blazer allows Halliday something that biography never quite permits: the freedom to invent around a real shadow, to build a plausible emotional architecture where the historical record is thin. The adaptation was always going to happen. Books like Asymmetry — celebrated, compact, structured in a way that lends itself to screenplay dissection — are exactly what literary agents and producers read on weekends. What remains uncertain is whether the film will preserve the second section, the Iraqi-American one. It's the bolder half of the novel; it's also the half that makes the book a masterpiece rather than a well-observed relationship portrait. Without it, you have a competent love story. With it, you have something that asks uncomfortable questions about whose perspective, in the end, counts as literature. Gere's presence brings a different kind of question. He has spent much of his career playing men who exist in a slightly superior register of reality — American Gigolo, Pretty Woman, Arbitrage — men who are beautiful and compromised and aware of both. Ezra Blazer is not quite any of these things. He's a writer, which is to say his interior life is his public life, and his public life is his way of avoiding his interior life. That's a more complex performance than Gere has often been asked to give. In Scandinavia, we have a saying that roughly translates as: the longer you wait for something, the heavier it becomes. Asymmetry has been in development for years, which may explain why the announcement feels both exciting and slightly weighted with expectation. Halliday's novel is one of the best American debuts of the last decade. Whether the film will be one of the best of the next one remains, of course, a different question entirely. But Richard Gere is trying. That's not nothing.