The past couple of years have been relatively quiet ones for fiction, punctuated not by lightning strikes but by gentle, misty showers of high-quality work. Jesmyn Ward, George Saunders, Mohsin Hamid, and Jennifer Egan all brought honor to their profession with novels that tilted lyrical, introspective, melancholy—or else traditional, more fun to read than to talk about. The twenty-six-year-old Sally Rooney arrived with “Conversations with Friends,” a searching comedy of art and manners set in Dublin; Jenny Zhang had the plangent, profane “Sour Heart,” published by the Lenny imprint. Carmen Maria Machado, with the gorgeously nervy and kinky short stories in her collection “Her Body and Other Parties,” perhaps came closest to inspiring a roar.

It is probably Trump’s fault that so few recent works of fiction have become events, in the way that “A Little Life,” by Hanya Yanagihara, did in 2015, or “The Underground Railroad,” by Colson Whitehead, did a year later (or “Cat Person,” by Kristen Roupenian, did in December). By event I mean: lovingly curated quotations saturate Instagram; every book club you know is reading it (your mother’s, your neighbor’s); breathless reviews crop up in publications better known for their economics coverage; magnetic young people with interesting piercings peruse it in coffee shops; friends text you to ask what page you’re on; etc. What closes the distance between a well-received novel and a literary phenomenon? The spaceship must be ingeniously made, of course; but then mysterious hyperdrives—luck, fate, the fixations of “the moment,” whether or not the book was published before 2016—would appear to kick in.

“Asymmetry,” the début novel by Lisa Halliday, the recipient of the 2017 Whiting Award, started breaking through the literary event horizon in February. The book unfolds in rounded binary form, major and then minor, its first movement (“Folly”) inhabiting a wistful, comedic key and its second (“Madness”) suddenly airier with sorrow. (There’s also a slim, revelatory coda.) Halliday 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. He showers Alice, with her vague and private dreams of writing fiction, in Camus and Arendt, Joyce and Genet—and also in fur-lined Searle coats, ice-cream cones, and money with which to pay off her student loans. Ezra’s mind is brilliant but his body is frail. Alice describes the sex as “like playing Operation—as if his nose would flash and his circuitry buzz if she failed to extract his Funny Bone cleanly.” Meanwhile, the unformed protagonist barely indents the page. Like one of Rachel Cusk’s cool-voiced narrators, Alice withholds most of her thoughts, only feinting at “the incessant kaleidoscope within” through lines of wry or tender dialogue, or else with riotous descriptions that erupt as if by accident: “Light shimmered in the trees, whose leaves, when the wind ran through them, sighed like the gods after a long and boozy lunch.”

The novel surely owes some of its event-ness to the voyeuristic thrill of reading about watching baseball in bed next to Philip Roth; ordering Walnettos from the Vermont Country Store account belonging to Philip Roth; having geriatric, Hasbro-inflected sex with Philip Roth. (“He came like a weak water bubbler.”) But it is also, actually, spellbinding: “so strange and startlingly smart,” Alice Gregory wrote, in the Times, “that its mere existence seems like commentary on the state of fiction.” Much of this strangeness and smartness comes down to structure. After Alice, Halliday abruptly introduces Amar Ala Jaafari, an Iraqi-American economist and the first-person narrator of “Madness,” who, unlike the reticent young woman, roils with memories and emotions. He’s gone to London to meet a journalist friend; from there, he plans to fly to Kurdistan in search of his brother, Sami, who has disappeared. The year is 2008, and the war on terrorism is well under way. Amar, a dual citizen of the United States and Iraq, gets detained at Heathrow for a Kafkaesque round of questioning. Between interrogations, he considers his childhood in Bay Ridge, his Ivy League education, his former girlfriend; presented out of order, the scenes glow with specific thought and perception, a testament to Amar’s interior life (while Alice often made her own scenes feel uninhabited). Adding to the lyrical force of this section is the urgency of new asymmetries: not, any longer, between ambition and achievement, or a younger woman and an older man, but between the West and the Middle East, the state and the individual.

“Asymmetry” poses questions about the limits of imagination and empathy—can we understand each other across lines of race, gender, nationality, and power? The fluttering way in which Halliday pursues her themes and preoccupations seems too idiosyncratic and beautiful to summarize, although there are serious, “Gone Girl”–grade spoilers that a reviewer must worry about revealing. (This piece touches on several of them, so stop reading here if you must.) The book richly considers the diffusions of life into art, of my consciousness into yours. It is also a musical document, with characters that play the piano or devote a great deal of energy to considering which CDs they’d want to bring with them to a desert island. Like music, “Asymmetry” possesses the mysterious quality of a created thing moving through time, expressing its own patterns, its meaning subsumed in the shifting symmetries of its form. Perhaps I have mischaracterized the book as a “literary event”; it might just be the song of the summer.

It certainly speaks to present-day conversations, though obliquely. The relationship between Ezra and Alice—the maestro and the talented novice—is both clarified and occluded by the concerns that #MeToo has forced into the spotlight. He asks too much. She trusts herself too little. Take or leave a triggered defibrillator, the reader can guess how their story will end: with the wised-up ingenue extricating herself from the demands and condescension of the mentor/monster in order to stake her claim on the world. Yet the sadness of “Folly” seems as much a matter of timing as it is of skewed power dynamics. One wonders what might have happened had the lovers met in some alternate universe, with he younger or she older, or he a woman, or she a man. How would this narrative have run differently?

That question flirts with tautology, but “Madness” and the novel’s coda expose “Asymmetry” as a meditation on who we might be when the most obvious components of our identity—age, religion, ethnicity, gender—have been stripped away. The coda, which confirms with the lightest of touches that Amar sprang from Alice’s head, suggests that our inner lives hold more nuance than can be contained in the boxes we check on a census form. This nod to the promise of artistic universality could account for some of the book’s popularity: in granting the white woman (qualified) permission to imagine the Muslim postdoc, Halliday challenges the “stay in your lane” vigilance now dominating young-adult fiction in particular. Ironically (or maybe not, given his provenance), it is Amar who struggles to press his own experience onto paper. He finds himself unable to write about the devastation in Iraq: for him, the looking glass that functions throughout the novel as a metaphor for the creative process shows only chaos. He recalls watching the flow of traffic through the window of a California diner, so thrown at the time by news about his brother that the scene slid sideways into reverie. “Approaching their own reflections,” Amar remembers, 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.”