“The Ten Year Affair”
I just finished The Ten Year Affair by Erin Somers. The book was excellent, and it reminded me of Banal Nightmare by Halle Butler and the novels of Sally Rooney: a story of Millennials and their friends and spouses, told in a deadpan, I’m-sane-and-everyone-around-me-is-slightly-clueless style, with the plot being that one thing happens and then another thing happens and then another thing happens, and lots of conversations, not always using quotation marks so that the inner monologues and the interpersonal interactions blur together, which makes a lot of sense given that these things are all happening in our heads.
The Ten Year Affair employs a storytelling device also used by Lionel Shriver in The Post-Birthday World and also by whoever wrote that movie, Sliding Doors, with Gwyneth Paltrow. Somers did it better, though, in two ways. First, she leans into the reality that both threads of the story are fiction, and her protagonist is aware of the two threads. This is the right thing to do, because the point of an alternative timeline is not just that it’s something else that could’ve happened but also that we’re aware of the possibility: that other hypothetical world is always there in the periphery, just outside of reach and informing our actions in the real world. The second way that Somers did better than Shriver and that screenwriter is that she (Somers) avoids an easy way out. In The Post-Birthday World and Sliding Doors, the husband or boyfriend is a bad guy, and so, in the logic of the story the heroine is automatically justified in trying to find someone else. This removes the dramatic tension. In The Ten Year Affair, the husband is far from perfect, but he’s not cheating on his wife. The other thing done well in The Ten Year Affair is that all the characters are flawed. You’re seeing things through the eyes of one main character, and early on we get a sense of the goofiness of all the people around her–indeed, she bonds with one of her friends based on a mutual distaste for a mildly obnoxious third party–, but, as the book goes on, we see the viewpoint character’s flaws too. I like that Somers is willing, in the end, to make that main character as flawed as everyone around her, which I guess fits the there-is-no-escape theme of the book.
As a side note, point of view is done very rigorously in the book, to the extent that you get a sense of what all the characters look like, except for the protagonist, because she doesn’t need to describe herself, right? I guess the main thing we learn about the main character, regarding her looks, is that she’s not particularly insecure about her appearance: she doesn’t think she’s the most beautiful woman out there but she doesn’t really worry about her looks either. To me, this sort of rigor contributes to the pleasure of reading a book: I feel comfortably in the hands of a confident storyteller.
Going back a bit in literary time, The Ten Year Affair is a lot like the novels of John Updike: various suburban married couples having affairs. The writing style is different–Updike is famously lyrical, whereas Somers uses a Millennial flat writing style: This happens, then This happens, then That happens, etc. Kind of like Ernest Hemingway or Raymond Carver if they had a sense of humor.
I think Somers does a much better job than Updike in conveying what it feels like to be a parent. To me, Updike, like Philip Roth, was to the end of his life always a son, never a father. Updike did have four kids, but I guess his wife did most of the parenting. Updike’s characters often have children but always seem to be thinking only about themselves. Not so much that his adult characters are self-centered–I mean, yeah, they are, but that’s kind of the point–but more that their children don’t seem to exist at all, except to the extent that they sometimes have to be dealt with as obstacles when they get in the way of the parents. In contrast, the adults in The Ten Year Affair are very aware of their kids. In some ways this is similar to Little Children by Tom Perotta, a book whose entire theme is that these adults are thinking only of themselves and are not shouldering the responsibilities of parenthood.
The children in The Ten Year Affair are real people, but they don’t come to life as much as, say, the children in the novels of Meg Wolitzer. Wolitzer achieves an equality across generations that I rarely see in literature; perhaps it has something to do with her being a Boomer, coming from a generation in which kids are central.
P.S. I looked up Somers and it turns out she’s a fan of Lorrie Moore. Cool! I’m a fan of Lorrie Moore too. Although one thing that always annoys me about Moore is that her stories always seem to feature a main character who is a woman who is a good person and has to deal with asshole guys. Yeah, I get it, there are a lot of assholes out there, but Moore’s protagonists are always so clever and thoughtful that I find it frustrating that they keep coming across as victims. I think Somers does better in this area. Her appreciation of Martin Amis is good too. I think Somers should come out with a book of literary essays. I’d buy it.