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Within the novel by Erin Somers The Ten Year Affair, we meet Cora, a millennial mother who craves a bygone kind of passion from a man of a different time. Sadly, for Cora, morality in 2015 is rigid and cynical, and instead of having the affair, Cora devotes a full decade obsessively analyzing it, fantasising about it and talking it over with her potential lover, Sam – a father from her child's circle who holds the title “chief storytelling officer” at a mortgage start-up. The book presents itself as a humorous twist on the classic adultery novel and a sharp satire of a particular, self-aware clique of economically slipping New Yorkers. One could call it the definitive narrative of middle-aged unfaithfulness our entire generation deserves: an energetic, clever critique of unbearably anxious individuals who’ve managed to ruin even sex.

Depicting Smug Unhappiness

The central couple, Cora and Eliot are highly educated, somewhat arrogant former city dwellers who, as costs increased and their family expanded, have moved reluctantly upstate. Trapped by the “exhausting constant demands” of parenthood, they have desk jobs, two children, and an ongoing fungal issue proliferating beneath their bathroom tiles that they lack the energy and money to sort out. They spend time with similarly minded urban exiles who have fled the city to drink negronis from rustic glassware and judge each other amidst a more rural setting. But if Cora is lonely in this new environment, it stems not from her fussy, lifeless lens but because her new neighbours are “dull and vain, even more so than in their previous urban life”.

Eliot is intellectually lofty and utterly unaware. He snacks casually as she scrubs the oven and says he doesn’t wish to possess her. Cora imagines them attempting to endure a rustic life together, doing laundry by hand while he forages for mushrooms. She deeply desires drama, some moral abandon, a lover who will beg, and worship, and “express raw admiration for her prowess”.

"The mundane grind of everyday existence, one must acknowledge its relentless predictability."

The Problem of Over-Intellectualized Desire

The trouble is that she’s as high-minded and rigid as Eliot, and unable to surrender to primal passion. She finds it "an overwhelming request to feel fervor" (regarding her career, she says, but in truth, about all aspects of life). What she feels for Sam are “bland, liking-adjacent”. She craves “a transcendent physical experience and not think about her life for a second”. Yet, for a decade, Sam demurs while Cora languishes. She constructs an alternate timeline running concurrent to her actual existence, where instead of bills and school pickups, she has passion, luxury, and her imagined lover. As this fantasy dims, she imagines “a Gallic character called Baptiste” who teams up with Sam in helping her out of the bath, “leaving her with no duties, no responsibilities, no obligations, except to be worshipped as a youthful bride, tragically lost to illness”.

A Disappointing Conclusion and Undercurrents

When they finally do give in to temptation, their intimacy is melancholy, without much play or complicity. It isn’t the nostalgically perfect affair she dreamed up for a full decade. Cora puts on an alluring gown and Sam “stoically eat[s] her out within their rented space” before dinner. One imagines that Cora desires to inhabit a James Salter novel, where intimacy is messy and ambiguous, where imbalances of control exist, and everyone misbehaves, and nobody keeps score.

Throughout the novel the root of Cora’s problem: she possesses a sharp tongue, but a profound lack of happiness. Of Sam’s erotic photo, Cora critiques, “he tightened his stomach and ensured he was aroused, but failed to remove his casual footwear from the shot”. Since the event that diminished their pleasure was parenthood, readers may fret about the impact these flawed adults have on their kids. When Cora’s daughter asks about sex, the parents stumble. They start with babies then concede that sex serves other purposes. The father references male anatomy then concedes that one isn’t required. Finally, he lands on, “you're aware of private parts?”

Underpinning the narrative flows a quiet theme of common existential queries of midlife: do our lives have meaning? What follows our final breath? These ideas are more directly explored in Cora's internal dialogues. Considering these passages, one wonders what moral Cora and her jaded circle would derive from their unsatisfying escapades. Might Cora become more open to life’s imperfect joys, its corny pleasures? Upon being questioned by Eliot about her affair during an audio program on bondage, Cora thinks “all meaningful communication is undermined by its particulars”. Others could argue it's enriched. But that’s not Cora, and Somers doesn’t give the protagonist easy revelations, or stretch her where she is unable to go.

An Ultimate Assessment

This is a razor-sharp, uproariously funny, exquisitely detailed novel, written with such withering exactitude. It is profoundly self-aware, economical yet rich with implication: a portrait of a worried, self-protective cohort in middle age, perpetually self-conscious, at once afraid of and desperate for sensation. Or maybe that’s just the New Yorkers. Let’s say it is.