There’s No Telling

Annie Berke considers timelines not taken in new novels by Erin Somers and Catherine Newman.

By Annie BerkeDecember 18, 2025

• Fiction

IF READERS HOLD ON to one image from the poetry of Robert Frost, it’s that of two branching paths—one that has been trampled, the other relatively unkempt and uncharted. That famous distinction, though, comes later; in fact, the speaker relates in the moment, “the passing there / Had worn them really about the same.” His insistence, then, that he “took the one less traveled by, / And that has made all the difference” doesn’t track—at least not in the actual, decision-making present. As Katherine Robinson explains, it is “the act of assigning meanings—more than the inherent significance of events themselves—[that] defines our experience of the past.” In other words, Frost only recognizes the road as “less traveled by” in retrospect; similarly, it’s in looking back that he decides it “has made all the difference.” This double statement of autonomy—I chose, and my choice mattered—is confident in its own nostalgic (potentially baseless) truth, highlighting the chasm between the certainty of hindsight and the doubts of the moment at hand.

Holly Gramazio’s 2024 novel The Husbands offers a humorous take on this forked narrative problem: a woman confronted with a string of new husbands that enter and exit her world through her attic. Her job, social sphere, and even the lives of her friends are impacted by whom she marries, yet often she returns, like defective merchandise, multiple dud spouses in a single day. This past April, Katie Kitamura published Audition, her fifth novel, centered on an actress who, in the first half of the book, has a prospective protégée and paramour. In the second half, the same young man has been “recast,” in a parallel timeline, as her son. “I could sometimes see,” she explains, “from the edges of my peripheral vision, a version of the world that was different from the one I occupied in this one critical factor, and therefore almost unrecognizable.” While Gramazio’s version holds tighter to a Hollywood universe of sliding doors and butterfly effects, Kitamura’s world is in the key of Ingmar Bergman, faces blurring together, motifs recurring in uncanny moments of intersection.

Two novels released this October—Erin Somers’s The Ten Year Affair and Catherine Newman’s Wreck—examine another two female protagonists, Cora and Rocky respectively, who are similarly transfixed by the futures that might be, the lives they want, the fates they have evaded. Both are educated white women, married mothers quick with a joke or pop culture reference. These women and their families live in nice houses in picturesque, small-L liberal communities with (presumably) robust property taxes. Cora is exhausted by the needs of her growing children; Rocky, on the other hand, yearns for quality time with her grown-up kids. Somers’s and Newman’s novels are not high-concept like Gramazio’s, or experimental like Kitamura’s, but they interrogate the same host of anxieties and desires so strong that they fragment reality, the ability to be present, as our minds and memories are sent in a million directions.

Focused as they are on maternal protagonists, both books home in on how living in multiple timelines has always been the domain of the meal planner, the consummate worrier, the art and pain of the parent spread thin (indeed, for many mothers, a jaunt across the mental multiverse is just another manic Monday). Still, the implications of the split consciousness they illustrate is not exclusive to parents or caregivers. Anyone who wants to exercise control over their own life—and who doesn’t?—is implicated. Somers’s and Newman’s explorations read as all too proximal: these are not extraordinary people; these are not unique circumstances. We could be them—or they us—which is what makes these otherwise quiet, funny novels feel so dangerous.

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“If you agree to share your life with someone, you’re never free again. […] There’s love. There’s friendship. There are your children. Intermittently, there’s sex. But the freedom goes away.” These lines run through the mind of Ten Year Affair’s outwardly fortunate but otherwise unfulfilled protagonist Cora. Everyone and everything in Somers’s novel is filtered through free indirect discourse, so that Cora’s absurd sense of humor, doomy and furious, shapes our every perception. Cora does her best with a middling career in marketing; her sex life with her silly, attentive husband, Eliot, has been dulled by his antidepressants. Her young son, Miles, is both wild and regimented, while her older daughter, Opal, grows up into a mean girl. In a second trajectory, all the above remains true, but Cora envisions having an affair with her neighbor and PTA compatriot Sam. In yet a third strand of reveries, her marriage is revitalized by the birth of an imaginary third child.

At these fork-in-the-road moments—lingering hugs or open-ended questions—the narrative provides a kind of choose-your-own-adventure syntax. “In reality,” one thing happens; “in the world of the affair,” another. These explicit cues aren’t completely necessary, as the atmosphere of the story becomes noticeably thin and heady in the fantasy realm, where “the rules were different […] The rules were ‘Do whatever you want and don’t worry about it.’” The invented intervals look different on the page; notably, they lack quotation marks. It is as if the alternate narratives are simply the air Cora breathes, the voices and characters living inside her head vivid but undifferentiated. Of course, these are just fantasies. Until they aren’t.

Wry, discerning, a little numb inside, Cora could easily be (but is not) the older sister of June Bloom, the comedy-writer protagonist of Somers’s debut novel Stay Up with Hugo Best (2019). June, like Cora, is more comfortable playing the witness than being an active participant, even in her own affairs. But where June is a writers’ assistant on a late-night show who performs at open mics in the evenings, Cora is mostly her own audience. During a period of marital strain, she pictures sending a depressive Eliot off to an old-timey sanitarium where he might “wander around in the Alpine air writing inscrutable poetry.” When she considers hosting a party and the duties it would entail, the assignment is framed as such: “It would take Cora hours to work up the energy to call a clown. She’d have to block out a whole day for it. It would involve confronting the choices she’d made in life up until that point, the entire chain of events that had led to calling a clown.”

Accordingly, despite its lack of an explicitly comedic premise, Ten Year is even funnier than Stay Up, its look at the domesticity of the creative class simultaneously savage and tender. Cora is as keen an observer and satirist as any of Somers’s characters, and she trains her withering gaze on her own shortcomings as a wife, worker, and mother. And the men in Somers’s latest novel are rendered vividly as a particular type, if only to a select few. Take, for example, Cora’s grudging decision to introduce her crush to her husband:

She thought Eliot and Sam would get along. She could picture their pleasant, dick-swinging camaraderie. The way they’d know common people from the schools they’d attended. The way they’d bond over totems of millennial soft masculinity: craft beer and Knausgaard and basketball and socialism.

(Where these men might read about Knausgaard—well, it’s anyone’s guess.)

These sensitive patriarchs, their wives and children, live in Beacon, a small town in the Hudson Valley where the author also happens to reside. These people are, Cora informs her new neighbors, “who you’d expect. They thought they were better than New York City and they thought they were worse. They were conflicted, overeducated, somewhere between modestly prosperous and completely broke.” Heavy and silly, tense and neighborly, the world Somers has created is one that, as Cora notes, “could not recognize gravitas. Every serious exchange was undermined by its particulars.”

Is it any surprise that, mired as she is in this tastefully oppressive homogeneity, Cora envisions alternate designs for living? The extent to which their lives are not only comfortable but also interchangeable comes up around halfway through the novel, at a party at Sam’s house. Eliot’s boss mistakes the home for Eliot’s; he and Cora play along. After all, “he wasn’t lying because it was how they lived. Broadly speaking. They lived in a house like this. […] But they didn’t, you know, actually live there.” In the same exchange, Cora accepts compliments about photographs of children who are not her own. Again, they do have children, broadly speaking—just not, you know, those kids.

In such an environment of swappable, good-enough objects, people, and dynamics, infidelity is pointless—the two men are appealing and annoying in basically the same ways—but still enticing. Sam offers the promise of something different, if not necessarily better, than Eliot: he is the path (as of yet) untaken. Cora is only lightly interested in her own motivations, more invested, instead, in her libidinal fixation on Sam’s toothpick-chewing habit. In a rare moment of introspection, she admits to herself that “she had designed [her life], wanted it, set it into place, expected it to have meaning, and then it hadn’t.”

Ten Year is wider in scope than Stay Up, taking place across a decade (as opposed to, in Somers’s debut, a long weekend). Little happens—like really, actually happens—and such narrative fidelity to tedium falls in line with what Cora calls the general “shabbiness of real life.” Even so, the book is undeniably thrilling for a story about people who struggle to feel deeply, much less act on those feelings. Sometimes, Cora pictures “one of the many Coras breaking rank. She was thinking about one of them getting up and leaving.” Where is this rogue Cora going? Not, it seems, toward another fantasy but up in smoke, culling the herd of realities in favor of one lone timeline. For Cora, to live just one life at a time is at once a “radical thought” and a claustrophobic ideal to which she aspires—or, at least, admires as a fantasy of its very own.

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Catherine Newman is never one to shy away from a challenge: her adult debut, We All Want Impossible Things (2022), is the funniest novel I’ve ever read about hospice, featuring characters who are witty in the way real people are witty. (“If anything happens to me …” a terminally ill character quips, “just on the off chance.”) Newman’s new, also witty novel Wreck is, like Somers’s, a story shot through with the what-might-be. Here, however, the alternate timeline surfaces not as a daydream or an emotional escape valve but, rather, as a void. Portal, perhaps, might be a more apt term, as the story starts with the steady progress of a mysterious illness, the protagonist Rocky poring over the unprocessed medical reports on her online account—a portal that is not just a means of communication but also a host for the many gruesome futures she imagines toppling down from above.

In the novel’s opening, a sleepless Rocky contemplates her brain: “In one single day, in two different directions, my life swerves from its path. […] There’s a headlamp shining out from my forehead like I’m a miner, and what I’m mining is my own insomnia.” As for Cora, the image of the path emerges. But this contemplation of alternate journeys is driven by Rocky and her fear of family tragedy, in contrast with Cora’s imaginative escapes from domestic drudgery.

Wreck is a stand-alone sequel to Sandwich, a bestseller from last year that moves between the past and the present while remaining rooted in a keen sense of place over the course of one Cape Cod weekend. In Sandwich, Rocky is in her fifties, menopausal, a devoted mother, a recipe author living with her endlessly upbeat husband and her now-widowed father in a nest that isn’t entirely empty; as in the prequel, her twentysomething daughter, Willa, remains a recurring guest star. These supporting characters are complex and sensitively rendered, never falling into the trite traps of “relatability” or “likability.” Rocky’s secret—the one that must eventually come out for the weekend to find its logical close—is devastating without being lurid.

Sandwich is a novel about relationships; Wreck is more inward-facing, with a narrower scope, taking Rocky to quiet, dark places she can only reach in her own mind. It has higher medical stakes but lower emotional ones. It is not a book about what has happened but mostly about what could happen—and how all the consequent wondering and worrying leaches into the present. “I am nothing if not a scholar of my own demise,” Rocky observes, an encapsulation of the navel-gazing perspective of this first-person account. Her troubles are varying degrees of real and present: a growing rash on her body has the doctors perplexed, sending her to specialists for batteries of tests; one of her kid’s former classmates was killed when a train collided with his car; Rocky’s son, Jamie, works for the consulting company that advised the train company against more safety regulations.

Jamie’s way of carrying guilt differs from his mother’s—she stalks the classmate’s mother online. “[T]his way it’s like the kind of movie where we could have switched places,” he explains to Rocky, who thinks to herself: “I don’t totally know what he means, but I get the flavor of it—two interchangeable young lives.” Rocky navigates her love for her children, her desire to support them in their own decisions, while she also tries to maintain contingent employment as a food writer. “While Willa suffered,” she thinks, “the house slowly filled with a warm cloud of nutmeg and clove. I was Philippe Petit, walking the wire between the Twin Towers. Or maybe I was the wire.”

That feeling of inhabiting two worlds at once—or, even more provocatively, acting as the border—is the most haunting element of Wreck. Rocky compares herself to an “isolation tank: lonely, private, confining.” Through her medical portal, technicians offer unmarked reports full of scary terminology. “Based on the core biopsy samples,” Rocky observes, “the lymph node has been deemed diffusely abnormal, which should definitely be my stripper name.” When the pharmacy cannot fill her prescription, she is forced to follow up: “Ugh, sorry, me again! I write in the portal. ‘Could you possibly …?’”

Rocky’s bouts of humor are met with equally explosive fits of sobbing, the emotional wear of living on, and as, a tightrope. When Willa locks herself in the bathroom to vomit, Rocky observes “the blankness of that closed door—like a portal to misery, snapped shut behind her. No access.” The metaphor of the portal creeps from her medicalized existence to her familial one. But rather than a tunnel to new worlds, the portal is here a foreclosing of joy, a proliferator of countless bad outcomes. “Diagnosis was more like decorators holding up a paint swatch and eyeballing a match,” she observes, “than like researchers squinting through a microscope and making objective determinations.”

The reports pile up; doctors explain granulomas and fluid thrill tests; the rash grows. “If [the rheumatologist] feeds me a broiled chicken leg and then removes my collar, buries her face in my fur, and cries, I’ll know the vet is coming to put me down,” Rocky thinks. Meanwhile, not far away, a woman mourns her son. Rocky obsessively tracks this woman online, in the hopes that vigilance will somehow steer her life away from this particular misfortune.

Perhaps, Wreck suggests, the burden that comes with free will, while substantial, is still lighter as the fear that fate has already set the course. Rocky’s vision of the future is not only colored by the uncertainties in her own life but also by the knowledge that even greater suffering is out there, free-floating, ready to latch onto its next victim. Wreck is a story of paths leading to loss, both real and counterfactual. Because it was written by Newman, this forked narrative remains entertaining and self-effacing to the last—funny in a “ha ha” way but also in the dread-in-the-pit-of-your-stomach way, the way Rocky describes watching the night sky with her family. “[W]e’re not in any danger, of course,” she reflects. “But that’s not exactly how it feels.”

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“One day,” Rocky wonders toward the end of Wreck, “will we look back and think: Wow, that was a hard year? Will we be damaged and scarred, but okay? Or will we think: That was when things first started to get bad? There’s no telling.” Are there three lines that better encapsulate living through the past 10 years, with friends and neighbors not unlike Cora or Rocky? I have yet to find them, but maybe someone else has (in Knausgaard, perhaps?).

What Newman is really asking, though, is not what will happen to Rocky, or to any of us. Instead, Newman’s and Somers’s stories question how we will later reflect on the choices we are making now—that same issue of retrospective meaning that lies at the often-misinterpreted heart of Frost’s poem. Neither of these novels has the answer. But in their depth of detail and understanding, The Ten Year Affair and Wreck offer readers an unsparing, compassionate portrait of what it means to navigate the ever-forking present—the future evasive and unknowable, as we fruitlessly hope that our small choices will not turn out to be insignificant or interchangeable but, rather, will make all the difference.