THE TEN YEAR AFFAIR, by Erin Somers
A lot of people cheat: 20 percent of married men in the United States and 13 percent of married women, according to the General Social Survey. Those figures undoubtedly understate the true total, as not every cheater is likely to admit it.
Still, I knew just what Erin Somers meant when she wrote in the marketing materials for her new novel, “The Ten Year Affair,” that she couldn’t imagine her fellow millennials stepping outside their marriages with the careless ease of John Cheever or John Updike characters. Is her generation, Somers wondered, “too well-intentioned, too hung up on domestic equity, too strapped for cash, too determined not to repeat the mistakes of their parents”?
In a world where, as Cora, the novel’s protagonist, observes, “Even the word ‘affair’ has the ring of obsolescence, like a cigarette, or an adman, or a chaise lounge,” what would such a coupling even look like? More important, would it be worth it? These are the questions “The Ten Year Affair” explores.
A young married mother on maternity leave for her second child, Cora has recently moved from Brooklyn to an unnamed town in the Hudson Valley. At a local baby group, she meets Sam, another Brooklyn transplant. They become friends — in spite of (or because of) their chemistry. They kiss once, briefly, then discuss their attraction while sitting at a bar with their babies in tow. Cora wants to act on it. “But what about our families?” Sam asks.
Cora has no good answer. She just wants to “not think about her life for one second.” Not that there is anything wrong with her life — she has a devoted husband, two small children, a house (in need of repairs they can’t afford, but a house all the same), a job (it’s boring but not actively unpleasant). In other words, a fairly ordinary middle-class adult life, which is to say she is tired and stressed and mildly dissatisfied much of the time.
Sam wins the argument; he and Cora don’t jump into bed. But Cora imagines a world in which they do, and what it would have led to. The novel follows both scenarios — the one where they did and the one where they didn’t — over the next decade. In the real world, Cora and Sam’s lives become increasingly intertwined. Cora becomes close with Sam’s wife, their children become friends, the families form a pod during Covid. Along the way, kids grow older, jobs are lost, aging parents die.
Somers, also the author of “Stay Up With Hugo Best,” is adept at the kind of ironically inflected, socially observant writing that calls to mind stylish glossy magazine articles about “how we live now” (in which “we” always refers to upscale, urban, college-educated types). Sam and Cora’s husband, Eliot, for example, are said to “share totems of millennial soft masculinity: craft beer and Knausgaard and basketball and socialism.”
This is to say that if the novel’s prose doesn’t plumb the depths of human character, it is sociologically acute and slyly entertaining — at least to the kind of people who read stylish glossy magazine articles about the zeitgeist, or did before those magazines folded and/or became desiccated shells of their previous selves.
But as the story progresses, it develops a power that has less to do with Somers’s depictions of creative-class millennials’ tics than with her earnest, intelligent portrayals of domestic life. She retains the wit, the smart and pithy writing, but lets up on the knowingness, the insidery pontificating.
Take her portrait of Cora’s marriage. It’s not deep, but it is relatable and realistically rendered. Eliot is smart and funny, a good modern husband in the sense that he makes dinner. But he takes personal satisfaction in cooking; he doesn’t do the vacuuming or other tedious tasks. When Covid hits, he isn’t the one who takes responsibility for child care or teaching their kindergartner to read.
And between his antidepressants and his penchant for smoking weed at night, Eliot doesn’t have much interest in sex with Cora. The sum total of this portrait is such that the reader understands perfectly why Cora married Eliot and why she loves him — he is lovable — and also why she constantly fantasizes about sleeping with Sam.
Long before the term “multiverse” became a mainstream coinage, cheating stories have invited the conceit of parallel narratives and alternate realities. See: the 1998 Gwyneth Paltrow film “Sliding Doors,” or the 2007 Lionel Shriver novel “The Post-Birthday World.” “The Ten Year Affair” isn’t as committed to the parallel-reality setup as either of these. The world in which Cora and Sam decided at the bar to have an affair is not presented as fully developed: It is clearly a product of Cora’s imagination, ruminations about what might have been. Still, what Somers does give us of that reality is mostly — except when it briefly devolves into pure fantasy — plausible and compelling, and it’s fun to see how, over time, those worlds converge and then move apart again, often in unexpected ways.
A narrative turn at the end of the novel felt a little undercooked to this reader, a means of tying up the story and imprinting it with a clear, therapeutically inflected takeaway about what was really motivating Cora all along. (Hint: It wasn’t actually love for Sam.) Still, Somers’s crisp writing makes for a humane, frequently funny and very readable novel that captures something not just about how we live now, but about choices, compromises, sacrifice, being a parent, getting older.
Also: sex. There’s a lot of sex in this novel (no surprise, I guess, given the title). Much of it is good, refreshingly so, given a general dearth of good sex in literary fiction. But affairs are also about more than sex. As Cora reflects in one of the timelines (it may be surprising to learn which): “There had been moments of fun and moments of terror. Many moments of disappointment. She’d gotten to take a risk, which she hadn’t thought she’d ever get to do again.”
THE TEN YEAR AFFAIR | By Erin Somers | Simon & Schuster | 304 pp. | $28
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