The Reconciliation Plot

Daisy Alioto on two new novels in which marriage survives an affair.

I remember sitting by the lake when my friend told me his father had left their family, placing his wedding band on the kitchen counter. When his father came back, he denied ever doing that. To me this story represented the mystery of adults—it still does.

We are at the tail end of a series of divorce novels, the most memorable of which are thinly veiled autofiction. Nested inside the divorce novel is the open marriage plot or perhaps the affair plot, like a house inside another house (a friend’s version of the secret room dream). 

Some of these books even speak to each other. In Liars by Sarah Manguso, the narrator throws bricks at the concrete wall in her yard to cope after her husband leaves her for a family friend. This affair is preceded by years of what the narrator comes to admit to herself was mistreatment (hence, Liars). 

“Before I could write, before I could even speak…I threw bricks. And so I wrote on that wall the first document of my rage.” In the non-fiction half of The Möbius Book by Catherine Lacey (which also begins with an act of betrayal) we get this brick-throwing ritual from another angle when Lacey goes to visit Manguso: “We took turns throwing them that morning, then she watched me, newer to the wreckage, commenting on my form, handing me brick after brick.” 

Now, a new slate of books has entered the literary fray, ones with affairs that don’t end in divorces. Most notably, Seduction Theory by Emily Adrian and The Ten Year Affair by Erin Somers. They fall in to what I am calling the Reconciliation Plot. A category of novel that asks: What if the affair was, to the continuous marriage, simply, a house inside another house?

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