In Permanence, Sophie Mackintosh’s fourth novel, Clara and Francis are having an affair. She is younger than him. He is married with a child. Their romance starts in a museum, when they meet in front of a dark oil painting. They notice each other; he moves into the next gallery; she follows him; she leaves the room to see if he will follow her; he does. In the stairwell, his hand in her hair, she “ran headlong towards what felt like the rest of her life”, Mackintosh writes, as close as this author of remarkable restraint comes to breathlessness.
Over the next 18 months, as their affair plays out in secret, they fall in love. Because Clara cannot leave any item with Francis that will arouse suspicion, they grow to “stake much on what she thought of as votive objects”: cardboard tabs sprayed with the cologne he was wearing on the day they first met, kept in her pockets; a pearlescent black button from her dress, ripped off in impatience, which they agree is indistinct enough for him to keep; the keycard to a hotel room in which they stayed in the early days of their affair, which Francis doesn’t know Clara has kept, hidden at the bottom of her bedside drawer.
The affair remains secret until they wake up next to each other, in a hotel room in which they don’t remember arriving. The bed has “pristine sheets and a blue velvet throw rumpled at its foot”. There are parquet floors, a copy of a novel Clara and Francis both love, a wardrobe filled with their favourite clothes. When they go outside, they find a sky that is “uncannily blue”, violin music in the air, and couples everywhere. Soon they realise that everyone in this city is an adulterer, here with their secret lover yet with no need to keep them secret now. It’s an idyllic place, “vibrantly physical” and with the best coffee Francis has ever tasted. Better still, it’s a place where Clara and Francis are safe to be seen with each other, the only place.
Mackintosh’s clean, spare style is at odds with the rich intensity of this novel, which, at its heart, is about the most stomach-deep emotions a human might bear: desire that is overwhelming, even paralysing; fear that you will lose the only person you love; betrayal by someone you thought loved you. It is an art the Welsh-born Mackintosh has honed over several novels, which always contain a sense of the uncanny. In her 2018 debut, the Booker-longlisted feminist fable The Water Cure, three sisters are brought up on a remote island fearing the “toxins”—men—on the mainland. Her eerie follow-up, Blue Ticket (2020), tells of a world in which a lottery determines whether a woman will or will not have a child. And in Cursed Bread, which was longlisted for the 2023 Women’s Prize, a baker’s wife becomes obsessed with a new arrival to her postwar French town, whose inhabitants are soon dying in their droves.
As with any dystopian fiction, part of the fun of reading Mackintosh’s novels is working out which parts of our society exist in her imagined worlds and which parts she has twisted on their heads. In Permanence, a key belief—that extramarital affairs are immoral, that cheating hurts people—remains. That is why Clara and Francis hide their relationship from his wife and her friends, why Clara feels “ice in her stomach” when Francis accidentally refers to his wife by name for the first time. “She didn’t want a name,” Mackintosh writes, because she didn’t want to be reminded of the real person who is being sold a lie, didn’t want to be reminded that, in spite of their love, she remains Francis’s other woman.
In ‘Permanence’, a key belief—that extramarital affairs are immoral—remains
Yet in the city of impermanence, Clara and Francis aren’t punished for their misdeeds. In fact, at first you might think they are being rewarded. Together they experience moments of euphoria: wonderful sex; delicious meals; perfect scenery. They wander around the pretty city with no real aims, no work, no chores, eating in cafés and browsing grocery shops full of fresh produce. That this is what they have been given vindicates Clara. “Every beautiful thing was a testimony. Every beautiful thing said, You have been right to live like this,” Mackintosh writes. “Inside herself, Clara was changing. It was evident to her, and to her alone. She was being given more than she had thought possible. Her body soaked it up. She felt submerged in bliss.”
But the couple don’t stay in the city. Sometimes, they wake up back in their respective beds at home. Then they find themselves in the city again. They can’t fathom whether there is something they are doing or not doing that leads to them moving back and forth until Lili, a new friend, tells Clara that a couple is forced out of the city of impermanence when they hurt each other. “Obviously hurting each other a little is unavoidable, we’re only human. But there’s a threshold of harm that’s allowed, and once you cross this threshold you’re both sent back,” she says, admitting that she and her partner haven’t yet figured out how to return. “But we pine and we pine and we miss each other, and we keep the fire burning. And maybe it’s just a matter of waiting, because eventually we wake up back here, and the counter’s reset somehow.”
With this knowledge, Clara is both liberated and trapped. She has given herself to Francis, totally and willingly, yet he has held back, in the real world often disappearing for months at a time, letting her down. When she is reminded of this, she grows resentful. As tension builds between them, she tests the limits of the city by walking away from Francis without explanation, leaving him sitting alone at a café, hurt and confused. When she returns some time later, the city has changed: shopfronts are boarded up and the fountain is dry. “I’ve done this, thought Clara, with horror and with awe,” as she learns that her actions also alter the pleasures the city affords them. She explains to Francis what Lili told her, and they decide to try to leave the city, in the hope things will be better once they return. “How best to harm the other?” Mackintosh asks, before reeling off a list of cruel charges each could land in order to emotionally devastate the other. In the end they decide on physical harm, so Clara goes to retrieve Francis’s razor from the bathroom. For this infatuated pair, to hurt and to love are too often one and the same.
Permanence isn’t the only new novel to concern infidelity—a whole host of recently published books lay bare the allure and agony of extramarital affairs. In The Ten Year Affair by the American author Erin Somers, Cora, a millennial mother, meets Sam, a millennial father, at a baby group in their upstate New York town. Cora’s husband, Eliot, is oblivious to the exhaustion of motherhood—while she is putting the kids to bed, he tends to get high. Fantasising instead about being with Sam, a doting father whom Cora is immediately attracted to, despite his strange predilection for chewing toothpicks, is a welcome reprieve. But while Cora has vivid daydreams of their regular rendezvous in an anonymous hotel in the next town, no physical cheating happens for a decade. Instead, her fantasies play out on “the other time line” or “the other reality” or “in the world of the affair”—that is, in her head. When she and Sam finally do get together, the sex is not half as exciting as she imagined it: “stoically” is the adverb Somers uses that most sticks in the mind. Now that “other world” becomes fidelity to Eliot, a fancy couples holiday spent on his arm, even a third child with him. Because it’s not Sam whom Cora really wants; it’s a different life to the one she is living, whatever that is.
The act of betrayal comes much earlier in Seduction Theory by Emily Adrian, which follows a married pair of creative writing professors, Ethan and Simone, who teach at a university in—again—upstate New York. Written from the perspective of Roberta, a graduate student who enters into an almost-affair with Simone—and whose viewpoint gives the book a sometimes unnerving edge—the book tracks the couple’s fallout after Ethan sleeps with Abigail, his secretary. While most cheating is a bad idea, this act really does seem unwarranted, given that we are told, time and time again, how all-appealing his wife is. “As the most acclaimed scholar in their department, Simone could have opted out of silk shirts, skintight jeans, those little heeled boots,” Adrian writes. “She could have let her muscles go slack, her waistline soft with middle age. Her face could have sagged into Arendt levels of androgyny and no one would have respected her less. Instead, Simone was a campus sex icon. Her author photo occupied the entire back cover of her memoir.” Abigail, meanwhile, “styled her sundress with a pair of Crocs”. It’s not that any of this makes Simone an intrinsically better person than Abigail, you see, but that Ethan is a very confused man—and Roberta, our narrator, a very envious student.
The list goes on. Miranda July’s singular and eccentric All Fours, which was not only raved about by critics upon its 2024 publication but also cited as the reason some of its readers have since gone on to “blow up their lives”, follows a perimenopausal woman whose extramarital affair leads to a sexual awakening. Lauren Elkin’s striking Scaffolding, which recounts the bedhopping of two couples in the same Paris apartment 50 years apart, is as interested in psychoanalytic theory as it is in good sex. Meanwhile, in Ben Markovits’s roadtrip novel The Rest of our Lives, shortlisted for last year’s Booker and one of notably few new books on this theme written by a man, Amy’s betrayal of 12 years ago is revealed on the very first page. Her husband Tom has put up with it all this time for the sake of their children, but once he drops their daughter off at college, he plans to finally leave her.
Exactly where this wave of infidelity novels has come from isn’t so clear. The finer details—themes of love and loss, obsession, betrayal, a character’s willingness to blow up everything in the pursuit of desire—are familiar forces in literature. But their channelling specifically through adultery, cheating, extramarital affairs, however you frame it, seems a marked trend. It could be a trickledown effect to the literary reader of the dominance of romantasy—the hit commercial fiction genre, its name a portmanteau of romance and fantasy—in which storylines featuring “forbidden love” or “fated mates” are hugely popular. But compared with those books, these are all high-minded literary affairs—there is even a preponderance of university academics and writers among the books’ casts—that enjoy their cleverness and play with the ethics of adultery. They trick their readers into thinking these cheaters are in the right, in the wrong, then right again, to a dizzying degree, only underpinning that questions of right and wrong are not at all the point.
That these books allow for such an honest, declarative portrayal of women’s desire—especially the particularly graphic All Fours, but also Permanence and The Ten Year Affair, which, while less explicit, centre their female characters’ wants and fantasies, both sexual and emotional—is a sure influence of the French Nobel laureate Annie Ernaux. The English publication of many of her slim, deft works of memoir over the past few years has recalibrated in the literary consciousness both the clarity with which a woman might express her desires and the significance an affair might play in a woman’s life—and therefore, in Ernaux’s case, her writing life. “From September last year, I did nothing else but wait for a man: for him to call me and come round to my place,” she writes in Simple Passion, her novelised account of the year-and-a-half-long affair she had with a younger married man, first published in French in 1991. The affair was so consequential to her that she recalled it 10 years after that novel’s publication: her nonfiction work Getting Lost tracks a plight of even more yearning. “Why doesn’t he call? Always the same question and never a valid answer”; “Moments of clarity: it’s obvious that S is tired of me. Conversely: on May 12, his passion for me was clear”; “Even the pain of November, though excruciating, seems preferable now.”
That these books allow for such an honest portrayal of women’s desire is a sure influence of Annie Ernaux
When Ernaux’s perspective is all we get, her passionate portrayals of this affair are intoxicating. The central concern of her works is the impact of this relationship on her alone, and she leaves it at that. She is not interested in trying to justify what she’s doing in the context of the man and the wife he is deceiving. She doesn’t try to weigh up the moral conundrum of what she has got herself into. For her, it’s purely about desire. That isn’t itself a simple thing—it’s tied up with class, gender, age, the freedom she was granted after she left her own husband in her early forties—but it is singular in its purpose.
The trickier, more frustrating thing about Somers’s and Adrian’s realist novels is that, although a moral judgement on these characters is not the point, they are so human that they still try to justify their cheating, to themselves, their spouses or the people around them. But it’s never really convincing when we get a look into the pain they cause by choosing it. In the end, these novels end up being almost-satires about bored, privileged millennials who don’t know how good they have it, so start seeking to destroy their lives and those of the people around them. Sexual frivolity and the unknown are distraction techniques from existences in which they have ceased to find any joy.
But rather than funny, these stories are really quite sad, especially The Ten Year Affair. “She’d once liked who she was and now she did not,” Somers writes of Cora, when Sam explains his plan to tell his wife about their relationship. “Falling in your own esteem was as bad as it got. Being unable to deceive yourself any longer about your goodness. Finding yourself severed from what you thought of as your values. Knowing yourself to be a person who mistreated the people you loved.” Affairs are meant to be fun, aren’t they? Somers assures us they are not.
After centuries of such stories focusing on male pleasure and male desire, it is refreshing for women characters, written by women, to be allowed to behave just as badly. But for all the “new” that this wave of infidelity literature brings, we are still being told the story of the cheaters, not the cheated. These novels tell readers that what they want is lust, passion, regret; that a story of betrayal told by the betrayed is just wallowing. Never mind that it all seems to come to pity in the end.
In the fantasy world of Permanence, at least, the impermanent city works for and against Clara and Francis with both such kindness and cruelty that the question becomes the more enthralling: will they make it out of the city together, and to what end? The push and pull of the setting’s walls press with some force on Mackintosh’s heady, addictive novel, but in the end, the fate of this relationship comes down to the couple’s differing priorities just as much as it would have done in reality. “Why leave?” Francis asks Clara. “Because you won’t give me anything real,” she replies.
