Assymetry by Lisa Halliday

This first effort was rewarded with a spot on the New York Times 10 Best Books of 2018 list. It is a debut novel by a woman who admits that she had a relationship with Phillip Roth as a young woman, and the male novelist in the first third of the book is pretty transparently modeled on him.
The second part of the novel is quite different and it isn't clear until the last section where it exactly fits into the story.  It is a monologue by Amar Jaafari, an Iraqi-American who is being detained by immigration officers at Heathrow Airport. The circular logic that keeps him there and prohibits his movement is so absurd, and also so unrelated to the tale of a young women who lets herself be subsumed by the author with a greater reputation than her own as to be unrecognizable as being part of the same story.  But in the end, if read very closely, we see where the story is going, and all in all, it is both a romantic comedy and a launching pad for something bigger in the future.