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In the novel by Erin Somers The Ten Year Affair, the story centers on a millennial mother named Cora, a millennial mother who craves a type of romance from another era from a bygone kind of man. Unfortunately for her, the modern ethical landscape is inflexible and jaded, so rather than embarking on the affair, Cora devotes 10 years obsessively analyzing it, fantasising about it and talking it over with the object of her desire, Sam – a playgroup dad who works as “chief storytelling officer” at a mortgage start-up. The book positions itself as a comic take on the traditional tale of infidelity and a send-up of a particular, self-aware clique of economically slipping New Yorkers. One could call it the midlife adultery story this current cohort has coming: an energetic, clever critique of unbearably anxious individuals who’ve somehow spoiled even sex.

A Portrait of Self-Satisfied Discontent

The central couple, Cora and Eliot are smug, overeducated Brooklynites who, as costs increased and their family expanded, have moved reluctantly to the suburbs. Caught in the “gruelling all-the-time-ness” of raising children, they have office careers, a pair of kids, and an ongoing fungal issue proliferating beneath their bathroom tiles which they cannot afford or muster the will to fix. They spend time with similarly minded urban exiles who have fled the city to drink negronis from rustic glassware and judge each other closer to nature. But if Cora is lonely here, it stems not from her own critical, joyless perspective but because her new neighbours are “boring and self-absorbed, duller and vainer than they were back in the city”.

Her husband Eliot remains intellectually lofty and utterly unaware. He eats popcorn while she cleans vigorously and says he doesn’t wish to possess her. Cora imagines herself trying to survive a rustic life together, washing clothes on a stone while he searches for chanterelles. She longs for drama, some moral abandon, a lover who will plead, and adore, and “express raw admiration for her prowess”.

"The shabbiness of real life, one must acknowledge its relentless predictability."

The Trouble with High-Minded Desire

The central conflict is that she’s as high-minded and rigid as Eliot, and incapable of that kind of abandon herself. It’s “too much to ask her to be passionate” (about work, she says, but really about everything). Her feelings for Sam are “bland, liking-adjacent”. She wants “a transcendent physical experience and escape her own reality momentarily”. Yet, for a decade, Sam demurs while Cora languishes. She imagines an alternate timeline running concurrent to her actual existence, where in place of chores and errands, she has sex and hotels and Sam. When her fictional romance fizzles, her mind conjures “a French guy named Baptiste” who teams up with Sam in helping her out of the bath, “leaving her with no duties, no tasks, no requirements, except to be worshipped as a youthful bride, tragically lost to illness”.

A Sad Conclusion and Undercurrents

When they eventually succumb to their desires, their intimacy is melancholy, lacking in fun or mutual connection. It fails to be the sepia-toned romance she fantasized about for 10 years. Cora dons a slinky dress and Sam “performs oral sex with grim determination within their rented space” prior to a meal. The reader senses that Cora wants to inhabit a certain type of literary world, where intimacy is messy and ambiguous, where the power dynamics are unequal, and characters act out, and nobody keeps score.

Somers consistently suggests the core issue for Cora: she possesses a sharp tongue, but a profound lack of happiness. Regarding an intimate picture from Sam, Cora critiques, “he has clenched his abs and ensured he was aroused, but failed to remove his casual footwear from the shot”. Since the event that killed their fun was having children, one worries about what these idiots are doing to their children. As her daughter inquires about sex, the parents stumble. They begin with procreation then concede that sex isn’t always about babies. Eliot mentions a penis then concedes that one isn’t required. Finally, he lands on, “you're aware of private parts?”

Beneath the story flows a quiet theme of familiar middle-age questions: is there purpose to our existence? What follows our final breath? These ideas are more explicit in Cora’s imagined conversations. Considering these passages, one wonders what lesson Cora and her cynical lot would derive from their unsatisfying escapades. Would Cora grow more receptive of 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”. Some might say enhanced. Yet that is not her nature, and Somers doesn’t give her character false epiphanies, or stretch her where she is unable to go.

An Ultimate Appraisal

This is an incisive, hilarious, finely observed novel, written with devastating precision. It is absolutely aware of itself, economical yet rich with implication: a depiction of an anxious, loin-girding generation entering midlife, perpetually self-conscious, simultaneously terrified of and hungry for intense experience. Or maybe that’s just the New Yorkers. For the sake of argument, we'll assume so.