In recent years, the literary marriage novel has taken a backseat to the literary divorce novel, the novel of interpersonal discontent and cynicism, with forms like autofiction sometimes used as a means of gaining distance from or interrogating the project of heterosexual coupling. Meanwhile, contemporary romance—smutty, cozy, saccharine, highly lucrative for the moment—has saturated the market, causing a panic over the tastes of the masses and the state of writing about marriage. It’s been a long time since there’s been a novel in the genre worth talking about.
Thankfully and just in time, Erin Somers, journalist and author of the novel Stay Up With Hugo Best, has given us one of the best marriage novels of the decade. The Ten Year Affair follows the interior lives and fantasies of two Hudson Valley couples, each wrestling with the mundane but universal dissatisfactions that come with middle age, parenting, and financial uncertainty. Cora and her family have traded the city for small-town life. When she meets Sam at a baby group and bonds over their mutual bafflement at the other parents, the two conduct an increasingly consuming friendship, one that limns the boundary between platonic, romantic, and sexual. Not only is the novel keenly observed and brisk in its pacing, it’s consistently and outrageously hilarious.
