Polygamy, Regret, and Revenge: Changing the Story of Infidelity | books

Hey In the first track of Lily Allen’s breakup album West End Girl, we hear a long phone call that leads to the breakup of a marriage. Allen listens, confused and then hurt, for about two minutes as the supposed husband on the other end asks to open up the relationship. Fans have clearly linked Allen’s marriage to David Harbour, the cop from Stranger Things (who’s probably also best known for his chic Brooklyn home). The two engaged in polygamy, according to the tabloid story, only for Harbor to break the rules and ultimately hurt Allen.

The album is good – beautiful and catchy, with a catchy touch of rage. But the public reaction went beyond appreciation for the work. Secession became the subject of appalling rubber-stamp censorship. It was a thrilling story about one of the oldest themes: infidelity, infidelity, and an affair.

I was following it with interest, as I was about to publish “The Ten-Year Affair,” a comic novel dealing with the same subject. The book has a double-chronological structure and delivers well-worn tropes: the crummy hotel room, the bucket of champagne, and the escalating lies told to couples. The structure is experimental. Time lines converge and diverge, beginning, towards the end, until they become blurred. In fiction anyway, infidelity is infinitely frequent, a way of framing and exploring contemporary life, a setting with implicit stakes – a shared home and perhaps children.

Someone once joked to me that the Odyssey is a love story: Odysseus spent all that time with Circe, after all. A man meets his wife; A man cheats on his wife. It’s a story we’ve been telling for a long time. In recent years we have seen a retaliation for the novel of academic affairs (Julia May Jonas’s satirical play Vladimir; Emilie Adrian’s sly and ingenious Theory of Seduction); The rise of the polyamory novel (Raven Leilani’s Electric Sparkle, in which a young black woman navigates the chaos of moving in with her boyfriend and his wife); And the wonderful films (Sally Rooney’s Conversations with Friends and Intermezzo).

The last post I enjoyed was Andrew Miller’s Winterland which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Set in rural England in 1962, the film captures the tone and feel of the era. The story follows a couple: country doctor Eric and his posh wife Irene; The Oxford dropouts turned to gentleman farmer Bill and his wife Rita, a former nightclub dancer. Both women are pregnant and strike up a friendship, visiting each other on the bleak, empty days of a frigid winter. Meanwhile, Eric is having an affair with a wealthy woman named Allison. “Was this thing he was carrying with her, he thinks, some vulgar bourgeois nonsense, or was it the only thing in his life that seemed like life, of which he was actually proud?”

The book is a retrospective, historical novel about a culture on the brink of change. At the other end of the tonal spectrum is Miranda July’s funny and whimsical “All Fours.” One of the most popular books of the last few years, it can also be described as a perimenopausal novel. It tells the story of an unnamed narrator who leaves her husband and child at home in Los Angeles for a cross-country road trip, only to find herself holed up in a cheap hotel a few towns over due to an affair with a young Hertz employee named Davey. The narrator’s crisis arose when she reached her mid-forties and realized that her sex drive might be declining. She still remembers that her grandmother “put herself in a garbage bag” and jumped out of her apartment window when she was 50 years old.

For most of the book, the narrator comes as close as possible to cheating without technically doing so. She and Davey take walks together, lie next to each other in a hotel room, have chaste but intense physical contact, and, in a horrific scene, watch each other in the bathroom. The reader waits for the moment when the narrator will finally go, but in the end something strange happens. Instead of sleeping with Davy, she sleeps with an older woman, a friend of Davy’s mother with whom Davy had a mysterious, abusive sexual relationship when he was a teenager. The move is strange and excitingly dark – instead of the young man she’s been obsessed with for 200 pages, it’s this strange, older woman.

There are other recent, less disruptive examples. In Liars by Sarah Manguso, a woman named Jane discovers that her husband, John, has cheated on her, and responds with predictable anger. The story of their disintegrating marriage is told in short, brutal parts: “In those days, when John ignored me or fired me, my mind told me I felt bad because I was overweight or because of a bad book review. I refused to look at the real reason.”

Likewise, Katherine Lacey’s book Moebius feels like an autopsy. Half of it is realistic and the other half is fantasy. The trick is that it can be flipped and started from either side. In the fantasy half, lines about love and sex appear stilted or constructed. This seemed to me a clever way to make a point about the language of fiction, its limitations, and its tendency toward triviality. “Here you go with your romantic poems,” one character says to another character.

But ultimately, both Moebius’ writers and the Liars seethe with resentment that undermines their innovations. Authors’ judgments are on every page. The Illusive Man’s name is not mentioned in Moebius’ book, but he is referred to pejoratively as “The Reason”. Both books refuse to see the conflict from any angle other than anger. They both refuse to go deeper. When I read it, I wondered: Is it the novelist’s job to spread morality?

Lauren Elkin scaffolds less judgementally. It takes desire seriously – its main character, Anna, is a psychoanalyst with a special interest in Jacques Lacan. It’s also formally innovative, following a couple living in an apartment in Belleville, Paris, as well as a couple who lived there decades earlier. Both spouses grapple with the momentum of independence, stability, home, and freedom. They both struggle with affairs.

The two narratives harmonize in certain places, or echo each other. Elkin uses the dual structure as a way to talk about the universality of these problems, their intractability, and their connection to everyday life. In the world of home repairs, wall braces and glasses in the sink, the problems of monogamy have long been presented as normal features of life.

Each generation writes its own narratives about local oppression. As Millennials settle into marriage, and as those marriages deteriorate, we’re sure to see more. The Millennium Edition tends to explore new relationship models, with polyamory emerging as a big theme, an idealized solution to the problem of monogamy that ultimately creates problems of its own. It’s also promising that it tends to focus on women and allows them to be fallible, funny and dynamic.

The genre’s enduring appeal may be as simple as voyeurism, but I think it’s also about ever-evolving perspectives on longing, aging, and the fear of death. “The most interesting part about infidelity is whether or not they want it,” says one character in “Scaffolding.” “It’s everything else around it.”