O n the first track of Lily Allen’s breakup album West End Girl, we hear a long phone call that leads to a marriage’s unravelling. Allen listens, confused then hurt, for almost two minutes as a presumed husband on the other end asks to open up the relationship. Fans made the obvious connection to Allen’s own marriage to David Harbour, the cop from Stranger Things (who is perhaps equally well known for his tasteful Brooklyn townhouse). The two dabbled in polyamory, goes the tabloid story, only to have Harbour break the rules and hurt Allen in the end.

The album is good – pretty and catchy, with an appealing edge of anger. But public reaction went beyond appreciation for the work. The breakup became the object of gruesome rubbernecking. It was a juicy story about one of the oldest topics: infidelity, betrayal, an affair.

I watched with interest, since I was about to publish a novel, The Ten Year Affair, which is a comedic take on the same topic. The book has a dual timeline structure and sends up the well-worn tropes: the sleazy hotel room, the champagne bucket, the escalating lies told to spouses. The structure is experimental; the timelines converge and diverge, beginning, toward the end, to blur. In fiction anyway, infidelity is infinitely iterative, a way to frame and explore contemporary life, a setup with implicit stakes – a shared home and maybe children.

Someone once joked to me that the Odyssey is an affair story: Odysseus spent all that time with Circe, after all. Man meets wife; man cheats on wife. It’s a story we’ve been telling for a long time. In recent years we have seen the reprisal of the academic affair novel (Julia May Jonas’s satirical romp Vladimir; Emily Adrian’s sly and witty Seduction Theory); the rise of the polyamory novel (Raven Leilani’s electric Luster, in which a young Black woman navigates the messiness of moving in with her boyfriend and his wife); and the throuple blockbuster (Sally Rooney’s Conversations With Friends and Intermezzo).

A recent entry I enjoyed was Andrew Miller’s Booker-shortlisted The Land in Winter. Set in rural England in 1962, it captures the tone and texture of the era. The story follows two couples: country doctor Eric and his posh wife Irene; and Oxford dropout turned gentleman farmer Bill and his wife Rita, a former nightclub dancer. Both women are pregnant and strike up a friendship, visiting each other in the bleak, empty days of a record-cold winter. Meanwhile, Eric is having an affair with a rich woman named Alison. “Was this thing he had with her a vulgar bourgeois nonsense,” he thinks, “Or was it the one thing in his life that felt like life, that he was in fact proud of?”

The book is retrospective, a historical novel about a culture on the precipice of change. At the other end of the tonal spectrum is Miranda July’s hilarious, quirky All Fours. One of the most celebrated books of the past few years, it may also be fairly described as a perimenopause novel. It tells the story of an unnamed narrator who leaves her husband and child at home in LA to take a cross-country road trip, only to find herself holed up in a cheap motel a few towns over pursuing an affair with a young Hertz employee named Davey. The narrator’s crisis has been triggered by reaching her mid-40s and realising her sex drive might decline. Her grandmother, she keeps remembering, “put herself in a trash bag” and jumped out of the window of her apartment when she hit 50.

For much of the book, the narrator comes as close as you can to cheating without technically doing it. She and Davey take walks together, lie next to each other in the motel room, make chaste but intense physical contact, and in one harrowing scene, observe each other in the bathroom. The reader waits for the moment the narrator will finally go for it but, ultimately, something stranger happens. Instead of sleeping with Davey, she sleeps with an older woman, a friend of Davey’s mother with whom Davey had an ambiguously abusive sexual relationship when he was a teenager. The move is thrillingly bizarre and dark – instead of the young man she’s obsessed over for 200 pages, this odd, older woman.

Other recent examples are less subversive. In Liars by Sarah Manguso, a woman named Jane discovers that her husband John has cheated, and responds with the expected rage. The story of their disintegrating marriage is told in short, brutal fragments: “Those days, when John ignored or dismissed me, my mind told me I felt bad because I gained weight or because of a bad book review. I refused to look at the real reason.”

Similarly, The Möbius Book by Catherine Lacey reads like a postmortem. Half of it is nonfiction and the other half fiction. The gimmick is that it may be flipped over and started from either side. In the fiction half, lines about love and sex come off as stilted or constructed. This seemed to me a clever way of making a point about the language of fiction, its limits and its tendency toward banality. “There you go with your romantic one-liners,” one character says to another.

But ultimately, both The Möbius Book and Liars boil with a resentment that undermines their innovation. The authors’ judgments are on every page. The cheating man in The Möbius Book is not given a name, but referred to disdainfully as “The Reason”. Both books refuse to see the conflict from any angle but anger; both refuse to plunge any deeper. Reading them, I wondered, is it the novelist’s job to moralise?

Lauren Elkin’s Scaffolding is less judgmental. It takes desire seriously – its main character, Anna, is a psychoanalyst with a particular interest in Jacques Lacan. It is also formally inventive, following a couple living in an apartment in Belleville, Paris, as well as a couple who lived there decades before. Both couples grapple with the push-pull of independence and stability, of home and freedom. Both grapple with affairs.

The two narratives rhyme in places, or echo each other. Elkin uses the dual structure as a way of speaking to the universality of these problems, their intractability, and to relate them to everyday life. Placed within a world of home repairs and wall calendars and glasses in the sink, the problems of longtime monogamy are presented as ordinary features of life.

Each generation writes their own novels of domestic repression. As millennials settle into marriage, and as those marriages fray, we will surely only see more. The millennial version tends to explore new relationship models, with polyamory emerging as a big theme, an idealised fix-all for the problem of monogamy that ends up creating problems of its own. Promisingly, it also tends to centre women and allows them to be fallible, funny and dynamic.

The enduring appeal of the genre might be as simple as voyeurism, but I think it also has to do with ever-evolving perspectives on longing, ageing and fear of death. “The most interesting part of infidelity isn’t will they or won’t they,” remarks a character in Scaffolding. “It’s everything else around it.”