“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…