New(ish) Books

Erin Somers and W. David Marx

Dear Friends,

I’m sharing a pair of book reviews. I have a piece on Rob Reiner up at Persuasion.

Best,

Sam

ERIN SOMERS’ The Ten Year Affair (2025)

If this is the apex of literature in my generation — and The Ten Year Affair is widely touted as being that — then we’re in trouble. There’s nothing exactly wrong with the novel — the story is interesting enough, Somers has a very plain style but I don’t particularly mind that — but everything in it just feels so, so timid, like the whole thing is a meditation on what in the digital, pandemic era, we have been reduced to, and the characters constantly ask themselves that question of why everything feels so bloodless, although, typically enough, they manage to ask it in the most timid way possible.

The book has gotten enough of a build-up that I felt myself writing it in my head before I read it, and I was pretty intrigued! — the idea of an affair elongated long past the usual timeframe, so that it becomes the primary substance of the participants’ life and then is superimposed across the whole story of a generation. It’s an arresting conceit, inherently lyrical, and then with a dose of smoldering passion.

But it becomes clear very quickly that this is not that. The setting is so studiously banal — Hudson Valley, “the last middle class town” — that nothing really passionate can happen. The star-crossed lovers Cora and Sam meet at a baby group. They are united against “broccoli mom,” the overbearing mother in the group who tries to force-feed vegetables to her infant, but really, as Cora and Sam deeply suspect, they actually aren’t so different. They work in deeply boring, depressing jobs — Cora does something third-tier in media, Sam writes copy for a glitchy mortgage app — their affair wends through such romantic settings as the PTA meeting, children’s playdates, an office goodbye party. What becomes quickly clear as well is that Sam and Cora’s husband, Eliot, are almost entirely unchangeable, both underearning, underbaked men, slightly overpowered by their wives and aligned with each other in what Somers calls “millennial soft masculinity.” And when Cora embarks on an affair with Sam in her imagination — the twinning strains of the two ‘realities’ are a major theme of the novel — the fantasy somehow manages to be just as banal as her real life. She and Sam meet in a depressing, anonymous hotel. They bicker, they get bored of each other, she gets an abortion (could she be the first person to get an abortion in her fantasy life?).

This is all clearly supposed to be the point of the novel, a kind of slow, sad Irish dirge for the American dream — everybody settling down into a shapeless middle, their lives less interesting and dramatic than their parents’, and so much so that all the color goes out from their dreams. “Modern history’s most shafted generation” is Somers’ term for her subjects.

Somers isn’t the first writer to try exactly this approach — to bring the passion of a love affair down to the level of the suburbs. It’s what Madame Bovary is and that demarcated the central tension of the modern novel. John Cheever and Richard Yates work with almost identical material, Yates in pretty much exactly the same plot of land where Somers finds herself. But there is a difference. In Yates, the dramatic tension is that the characters really are dreaming big — in Revolutionary Road, Frank Wheeler is fantasizing about Paris, April very much wants to be an actress. For both of them, Madame Bovary is somewhere off on the horizon. For Somers, Yates is off on the horizon. Even aspiration seems like a distant possibility. The characters work in “jobs for people who did not know what else to do” — being a corporate lawyer, as Jules (Cora’s rival) is, is presented as the height of sophistication. No one else has anywhere they want to move to — although there is the possibility of drifting away. And no one has anything really to offer each other — Cora understands very quickly that Sam is, if anything, a bit lesser than Eliot, although she keeps him in her fantasy life as a kind of placeholder of ambition and desire. When the pandemic hits, everybody’s lives seem to shrink to nothing at all, like a car that had been inching forward finally running out of gas. That was the main thought I had as I was reading The Ten Year Affair — that we can’t just be this. Vegetating in front of devices. Dreaming of corporate jobs and the chain hotel as the height of passion.

That seems to be, with the sound of a balloon popping, what Somers’ characters are also asking themselves, and the novel keeps moving from the domain of dramatic action to, more, social query. Cora is very much embedded in the sensibilities of her class — of a kind of corporatized feminism — and I don’t think she has a single distinct, original thought throughout the entirety of The Ten Year Affair, but even she finds herself wondering if something has gone wrong somewhere in the feminism experiment. “So in a way, victory? Yet up close it was disconcerting,” Cora reflects on Sam’s sinking to stay-at-home dad status. “Jules’ cheating on him should not have made him seem weak,” she thinks in another unwelcome spasm of traditionalism. “It should not have changed Cora’s perception of him. He was a victim, she reminded herself. And yet.” The general impression of the novel is of a referendum on millennials and millennial life, resulting in a resounding down vote, although the reasons for what might have gone wrong are never really explored. Cora, lashing out at her mother, says something about her mother’s generation driving up property values, which is about as far as we get.

Somers’ writing is not entirely without merit. She writes simply and unshowily with, occasionally, a nice turn of phrase. She’s at her best in a kind of fizzy drinks mode of intentionally understating the thing she’s talking about. She describes Cora coming home to the “harder workday where irrational people threw tantrums and demanded snacks.” Eliot is “smart but dumb or not even dumb but pure…he was gazing down on earth from on high and couldn’t make out many details.” Jules, in her homicidal mood towards Sam, “had had some ideation.”

But in terms of novelistic technique, there’s a lot to work on. We keep being told that Cora is such good company, and that everybody likes her, but we never exactly see that, and we hardly ever get enough of a glimpse of her true interiority — certainly not enough to warrant our caring for her across the length of an entire novel. Character traits never seem to emerge within the organic flow of the books, and so we suddenly get informed that Jules drinks before bed or that Sam weirdly has a gas station tattoo. Plot points seem to just come up at us out of nowhere — Jules and Sam suddenly moving or a flirtation between the children of the two couples that never leads to anything. And when she’s looking for humor or color, Somers often leans on some very simple constructions: “Cora’s mom had envisioned her as a nonsense lady. It had hurt her to realize that Cora was, in fact, nonsense.” Or: “The gin and tonics were so weak you could barely taste the booze. They were tonics and tonics.”

This is, for the most part, the level of the humor. All in all, it’s maybe not a bad reflection of the world of the novel — people in lifelong torpor, with their brittle friendships and half-hearted love affairs and personal qualities that are really just mildly adorable quirks — but I can’t shake, and I can tell that Somers can’t shake, the feeling that there really should be something more than this. If life has reduced millennials to bougie creature comforts in forgettable exurbs, it’s up to the novel, and novelists, to hunt for meaning. That’s what the project is, not this sketchily rendered slice of contemporary life.

W. DAVID MARX’s Blank Space: A Cultural History of the 21st Century (2025)

Hm. This feels like two completely separate books grafted onto one another. The beginning and end are a stirring call for artistic purity paired with incisive analysis of how the culture atrophied in our era. The ‘blank space’ of the title stands, as Marx tells us right at the end, for the “conspicuous blank space where art and creativity used to be.” And Marx does offer a compelling organizing principle to explain the flotsam and jetsam that filled the creative void. Basically, it’s capitalism, he claims. The pure hedonic capitalism of the ‘90s served as an acid that eventually dissolved the old aesthetic categories. Cultural hierarchies and even genre divisions vanished, a ‘poptimist’ sensibility prevailed where anything that was popular became its own self-fulfilling loop and any artistic squeamishness around ‘selling out’ disappeared, replaced by an enthusiastic pursuit of as much capital as possible. That poptimism eventually bled out of entertainment, taking over the society as a whole, as in the rise of Trump.

That’s one book. The other book is the one sandwiched in the middle, which is like an encyclopedia of every meme-worthy and viral event that happened in the period 2000-2025, although ‘dog’s breakfast’ might be a better term. Marx feels himself duty-bound to record everything that happened in politics, sports, business, above all entertainment, so long as it was shocking and reverberated around the culture. The result ends up being one of these old MTV paparazzi-style montages or the music video of “Video Games,’” of events suddenly cascading into public consciousness, of everybody behaving outrageously and of the players summarily melting down before the next titillating event comets across the night sky.

You kind of can’t help but be impressed that Marx put this all together, and I shudder to think of what the research process for Blank Space was like — a journey that required Marx to rewatch old episodes of The Simple Life and American Idol or to be able to cite Season 6 Episode 7 of Keeping Up With The Kardashians (focusing on a family intervention around Kris Jenner’s pee stains) as a totemic event in shifting the relationship between pop culture and entrepreneurship. But none of this is exactly in service of the thesis that Marx claims to espouse in the introduction and conclusion. The feeling is like being at an AA meeting where the speaker regales the audience with tales of all the fun they had when they were drunk and high before muttering something about Christ’s love as they leave the lectern. I find myself being less than convinced that what Marx actually cares about is “restoring cultural invention” when he seems to take such evident delight in each turn of the wheel of the dueling rap dynasties or exactly how reality TV superstars converted their fame into brand sponsorships. There is, for instance, no discussion at all of high culture in Blank Space — Jonathan Franzen and David Foster Wallace do not rate a mention — and the clear implication is that Marx is following the same market logic that he claims to bemoan.

So if the book is not really what it claims to be about — not a cri de coeur against “resignation,” in the face of cultural philistinism, then what is it exactly? What it kind of feels like is a mismatch of tools, of using an anvil to swat a fly or of King Cnut commanding the tide to stop. Marx wants to contain the cultural history of an era in a single book, but the cultural history, as he himself would be the first to point out, is so sprawling and inchoate that it constantly seems to resist this sort of categorization. The more promising path for what Marx is doing would seem to be a more structural approach — following the lines laid down by Marshal McLuhan, Neil Postman, and Martin Gurri. What Marx is describing is, in so many words, the collision of the internet with the traditional architecture of culture and with the internet sweeping all before it. The book is at its best in documenting the unexpected origin points of different memes entering into the culture — did you know that ‘grind’ emerged out of a motivational video for the 2012 Texas Christian baseball team? or, for that matter, that ‘woke’ rose to prominence in a 2008 Erykah Badu song? But Marx seems committed to a slightly older understanding of culture that puts aesthetic trends first. So he feels obligated to begin his history of 21st century culture with the Terry Richardson/Strokes/Vice early 2000s downtown scene before acknowledging that that was a “false start” and keeps looking for the founders of different trends, with Kelefa Sanneh getting credit for “poptimism” and the Neptunes for blurring musical genre lines. But this sort of attribution constantly breaks down when the logic of the internet, and of crowd-sourcing and disaggregation, makes a mockery of the notion of a handful of recognizable cultural figures driving trends.

What Blank Space flirts with being, instead, is more of a business book — of the smart guys in offices harnessing the power of the web and finding ways to channel the flow of web traffic into profitability. The real tale of 21st culture, Marx often posits, is a handful of new market strategies — of Hollywood turning retro, shying away from new content and simply repurposing preexisting intellectual property; of celebrities and their canny handlers riding the waves of publicity so that they always emerged on top (Paris Hilton and the Kardashians are viewed as the pioneers here with Taylor Swift as the alpha and omega of the form); of platforms consolidating control of mass culture without much interest in what the underlying content was. “The real money on the internet didn’t depend on marquee brands,” Marx writes at one point. “It thrived on aggregating mid-tier advertisers at scale. This shift eroded another avenue for non–tech elites to shape culture.” An unthrilling statement like that probably is closest to the real point of Blank Space — of how corporate culture responded to disruptive technology with a few brilliantly cynical strategies, maximizing eyeballs, clicks, and ad revenue and marginalizing innovation or creativity. “The ‘mainstream’ market was now all-inclusive and boundaryless, containing seemingly every possible genre. In the omnivore monoculture, artists were free to draw from any genre, provided the end result was glossy, marketable pop (with clever digital promotion),” Marx writes of what the end-point of what 21st century ‘culture’ turned out to be.

But Marx’s project is broader than trying to follow the blow-by-blows of a few decisive business decisions. He really does want to record it all, and in being comprehensive to try to divine the aesthetic patterns undergirding the culture. And here, I think, he’s guilty of a category error. What he’s not quite recognizing is the extent to which the ‘culture’ really did serve as entertainment and distraction, rather than as an expression of people’s actual lives. When he sifts through the detritus of pop culture and identifies ‘millennial pink,’ the ‘millennial whoop,’ and the ‘millennial pause’ as being something like the signature or beating heart of a generation, he seems to confuse a surface, pop culture manifestation with how people actually lived. (I managed to get through my entire life as a millennial without hearing of any of those.) The ‘culture’ that he is looking at is really a vast form of manipulation — much of it successful — as opposed to the real emotional heart of the era. It would sort of be like telling the history of the ‘50s only looking at magazine ads and listening to radio jingles and passing over things like Rebel Without A Cause or the Beats or early rock ’n’ roll, which, as it turned out, were far more reflective of the ‘deep song’ of the culture.

Or maybe that’s just wishful thinking on my part. I read most of Blank Space being deeply depressed. Essentially, everything that I would have wanted in the culture and society — and the period covered in Blank Space overlaps almost perfectly with my own consciousness — did not come to pass. Everything that I thought was a passing trend turned out to have staying power and to swallow up the culture. If I had been allowed to invest in cultural futures in the year 2000, what I would have tried to invest in was a greater interest in high-brow art, greater democratization of forms like film and music; greater liberalism in politics; and an ethos of egalitarianism in the culture at large. And what won instead was corporate behemoths, “royal houses in the pop aristocracy,” short-form clickbait, computer nerds turned into tech titans, and dizzying inequality with cultural victory based above all on monetizing outrageousness. Which goes to show that I may not be the best person to talk to in predicting, or analyzing, cultural trends. On the other hand, Marx’s tale of poptimism ascendant invites two contrasting interpretations — both of which Marx indulges in at different points in Blank Space. One is that this just is human nature, and the internet freed people to be their truest, lamest selves — “giving people the things they wouldn’t admit they wanted,” as Ben Smith wrote of Gawker. The other interpretation is that somewhere in here was a a failure of nerve. “We asked the question: what happens when we greet the tidal wave of postmodernism — the dreaded cultural logic of late capitalism — with open arms and put up no resistance?” Marx asks at the end of Blank Space. The implication is that we could have put up resistance, that somewhere or other in the tale of Blank Space was an alternative for the culture that would have been less lame and less vapid. It’s hard to see exactly where that might have happened, but I am with Marx in the note of wishful thinking that he ends the book on: we were fooled once, now the question is whether we let ourselves get fooled again.