The Ten Year Affair made me hate myself
It is not – it is never – a coincidence when an author inserts the word “ceaselessly” into the final, existentialist lines of her American novel. Especially not her adultery novel, set a short train ride from New York City. F Scott Fitzgerald and Erin Somers both wrote books that set out to explore the joint solubilities of fidelity and the American Dream. The Great Gatsby is a foundation of the canon. It is hard to imagine The Ten Year Affair doing the same.
We are presented with a story of East Coast, millennial adulthood: two, media-adjacent couples – Cora and Eliot; Sam and Jules – throughout the course of a decade in which they leave the city, become parents, then friends (they fuck, they don’t fuck, they fuck each other, and fuck it up). The first year is all fresh babies and settling into the Hudson Valley. The final year is part reconciliation, part departure and divorce.
The drama takes place in an anonymised town, mostly referred to as “here”, but evokes somewhere like Rhinebeck, New York – a place where disenfranchised ex-Brooklynites have been slowly settling over the past few decades. Anonymisation is a technique sometimes used to broaden the appeal of books, a way to reach beyond the middle-class-millennials of New York to places further afield: Los Angeles, Toronto, London. Somers employs it with gusto, though not to that effect. The bestselling novel, A Court of Thorns and Roses, becomes “that dragon book… that groups of women loved”; the Covid pandemic is, simply, “the global event”. Even the books, or should I say “leather-bound volumes”, are shrouded in oblique vocabulary. But perhaps the most telling of these obfuscations comes in the second half of the novel, during the joint 40th birthday party that Jules and Cora throw for their husbands. As the less uptight of the two couples, Cora and Eliot find that it’s their job to take a little bit of cocaine. They do it in the kitchen, off Jules and Sam’s copy of Nothing Fancy.
Nothing Fancy is Alison Roman’s first cookbook. Roman is the food-writer, personality, YouTube chef and author turned high-end Hudson Valley greengrocer. In this milieu of downwardly mobile atheists, she is essentially a deity; idolised, omnipresent and occasionally maligned. To refer to her work without attribution leaves those who do know with a glorious sense of self-satisfaction, and those who don’t with an opportunity to Google, then marvel, at the apt choice of media person with whom Somers skewers her very own.
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This is not a cutting critique, or even a particularly interesting observation, but a casual reach for the lowest-hanging fruit on the tree of contemporary cultural objects – a device that Somers is good at. Los Angeles is a place where the “food is low carb and has an avocado on top”, and the cars are “round white SUVs like pillows on wheels” – remarks that one can comfortably make having watched ten minutes of a romcom through the gap between aeroplane seats. Time is marked by reporting drinking trends; we know the year because “the wine was orange”, “cloudy”, “red, but chilled”. Life is constantly being reduced to these class indicators, at which the knowing reader is meant to find easy gratification and laugh. Nod nod, wink wink. The need for criticism is subsumed by the comfort of recognition.
Like the Walt Disney Company’s Marvel, Somers employs the “multiverse” to help organise her novel, allowing reality and fantasy to unfold simultaneously. “The real world” is a place where Cora and Sam abstain from carnal relations. In “the world of the affair” they’re fucking senselessly at an anonymous (lakeside) corporate hotel. And then, just like they do in the MCU, the timelines converge and switch. The affair gropes its way into “reality” while, in “the other timeline”, Cora is a focused mother, an attentive wife. At some point in the muddle, real Cora goes with Sam to a hotel for a horny weekend in the city, while multiverse Cora gives birth to her and Eliot’s third and final child.
The “multiverse” could have been an effective one-time simile with which to explain the all-consuming, out-of-body hallucinatory fantasy that an extramarital infatuation can provoke. Sustained as a structural device on which to rest an entire novel, no matter how well written, it wears thin. There’s a universe in which this book did not bombard its reader with cultural tropes and lifestyle cliché, and wasn’t such a trying read. But in that universe, I’m not a downwardly mobile, media-adjacent millennial. I don’t love Alison Roman and I can afford to live in the capital city I was born in. In “reality”, that’s not the case. In “reality”, The Ten Year Affair made me hate myself, ceaselessly. Perhaps, in this way, it’s a triumph.
[Further reading: The world’s most powerful literary critic is on TikTok]
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