Biblioracle on "The Ten Year Affair" by Erin Somers

Writing recently in the New York Review of Books , novelist and critic Adelle Waldman wonders about what happened to the “suburban novel,” as exemplified by writers like Richard Yates (“Revolutionary Road”), John Cheever, John Updike, and a bit later, Richard Ford (“The Sportswriter”) and Rick Moody (“The Ice Storm”).

Waldman is not just talking about novels set in the suburbs, such as Jonathan Franzen’s “The Corrections,” but the “suburban novel,” that “questioned the idea that undergirds suburbia: that marriage-kids-house-car is the basis for a good life.”

Just in time to challenge Waldman, we have Erin Somers’ new novel, “The Ten Year Affair,” which seems to fit the “suburban novel” to the letter. It manages to deftly balance humor and heart throughout as we see what the domestic li