Season 1, Episode 3
The tone of “The Affair,’’ intense and self-serious, doesn’t suggest that the series has any aspirations toward satire, and yet you have to wonder. The show’s central character, a novelist, has written a book called “A Person Visits a Place.’’ You have to wonder even harder when that character, at work on has second effort, shows up at a breakfast meeting with a big-ticket agent and presents his quarter-baked idea for the next, a story about “the death of the American pastoral.” Amazingly, the agent stays to hear the pitch, instead of stopping our resident novelist, Noah Solloway, midsentence to say, “I’d love to hear the rest but I’ve got tennis with Martin Amis in Sag Harbor at 10 o’clock.”
Noah goes on to deliver a cliché salad about a city guy who comes out to the East End of Long Island for the summer and falls for a local girl whom he ends up killing because he’s married and presumably — I’m improvising here — because the girl shows up all “Fatal Attraction” back in Brooklyn and she will really get in the way of a renovation.
In Alison’s recounting of events, she anticipates Noah’s simplification of the lives of the locals in Montauk. Alison is obviously much more complicated than Noah can see, and he still doesn’t know about her defining tragedy (nor does he or we know, until this episode, that Alison’s true occupation is not as a waitress at the Lobster Roll but as a nurse). Clearly she’s working at the Lobster Roll because it’s deadening and emotionless, which is just what she’s looking for (though she does have to endure Oscar Hodges’s repeated and entirely improbable lewd assessments of her.)
Speaking of Oscar Hodges, we know he won’t surface as the dead body, because Noah mentions him to the detective, in the flash-forward, essentially as a person of interest. Alison, of course, despite Noah’s ostensible literary direction, will not appear as the chalk outline either because she keeps showing up in the future with that urbane hair and all of those black gallery-owner clothes. Do she and Noah eventually marry? Noah alludes to a wife in the aftermath, but we don’t know for sure if that wife is Helen or Alison or someone else entirely.
Once again, Noah and Alison recall the early parts of their relationship in predictably conflicting ways. In Noah’s version, she’s always dressed to undress and always making the first move. In her own account she’s more demurely clothed, confused and tentative. But is she scamming us? Are we meant to believe that Alison is a cigarette-stomping femme fatale who is in some way involved in a murder? The future-tense clothes certainly suggest that she has come into some money.
And for a final word on local politics, just for the record, I’m with Cole: If you want to go bowling, go to Riverhead.
So who are your best guesses for culprits and victims? And are we leaning toward a more generous understanding of Noah’s view of things?