Talking Big

By Jay Innis Murray

I asked ChatGPT: What would you do if a mushroom grew out of a crack in your bathroom tile and the mushroom kept coming back after you pulled it out? Before giving me six bullet-pointed steps on how to deal with this problem, the chatbot said: The mushroom itself is just the symptom—the real problem is moisture plus hidden organic material. I asked the bot a follow-up question (without naming any names): If a novelist used this mushroom situation in a novel as the symbol of a marriage, what would you think?  The chatbot said: I’d think it’s a rich, layered symbol—and a surprisingly sharp one. It then jumped to conclusions for several hundred words, naming hypothetical scenarios for non-existent stories. I asked the bot to name a novel that does this with a mushroom, and, at first, it denied any book existed, but when I pushed it with a few prompts, it found The Ten Year Affair, the new novel by Erin Somers.

On the cover of The Ten Year Affair, there is a blurb from Tony Tulathimutte that calls the novel: “The best book about adultery since Madame Bovary.” Let me get one thing out of the way. This is not the best book about adultery since Madame Bovary. The style of the writing is so austere it is nearly undetectable. That is not to say it attempts nothing. The conclusion is rather beautiful, and through her lead character, Cora, Somers is a witty reporter of married life in the New York suburbs of the last decade. The possibility for drama and passion in Cora’s life is still. It is quiescent. Somers’ great strength is in observing less dramatic moments of everyday social life. Cora hated when she caught people rehearsing a remark on her to use later. Like whatever they said was practice for the real person they wanted to say it for. (Page 103) I like the way she notes the fallout from smaller confrontations or disappointments like this one. This held the book up for me since the strange strategy Somers deploys for the long-imaginary affair of the book’s title does not work. In fact, the split between the world of the imaginary affair and the world of so-called real life was annoying enough that I nearly gave up on it.

Cora meets Sam at a baby group in their small town. They are married to other people. The portrait of Cora’s husband Eliot is unattractive enough to make the affair seem inevitable. There’s a sort of Sun Also Rises situation in which a combination of medication and marijuana makes Eliot unable to have sex. Late in the book, Cora gives an explanation for why the affair with Sam happens.

It had been about the two of them [Cora and Sam], and it had been about sex. But what it had been about mostly was her life. Escaping it. Not that her life was stultifying or anything, but actually it was. The storybook town, the twenty-first-century marriage between friends. She had designed it, wanted it, set it into place, expected it to have meaning, and then it hadn’t… (Page 278)

Overall, I enjoyed this read for the observant wit, but the book gives the reader few surprises, and you can feel that. In art, you miss that magic when it’s not there.