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Within Erin Somers’s The Ten Year Affair, we meet Cora, a millennial mother who craves a bygone kind of passion with a man of a different time. Sadly, for Cora, morality in 2015 is rigid and cynical, so rather than embarking on the affair, Cora spends 10 years obsessively analyzing it, fantasising about it and discussing it with her potential lover, Sam – a father from her child's circle who holds the title “chief storytelling officer” at a fintech company. The book positions itself as a comic take on the classic adultery novel and a send-up of a narrow, self-conscious group of downwardly mobile New Yorkers. It stands as the midlife adultery story our entire generation has coming: an energetic, clever critique of insufferable hand-wringers who’ve managed to ruin even sex.

Depicting Self-Satisfied Unhappiness

The central couple, Cora and Eliot are smug, overeducated Brooklynites who, with rents rising and children growing, have moved reluctantly upstate. Trapped by the “gruelling all-the-time-ness” of parenthood, they have office careers, two children, and a persistent mushroom growing under their bathroom tiles that they lack the energy and money to sort out. Their social circle similarly minded urban exiles who have escaped the metropolis to sip craft cocktails from rustic glassware and critique one another closer to nature. Yet Cora's isolation here, it stems not from her fussy, lifeless lens but because her suburban peers are “boring and self-absorbed, even more so than in their previous urban life”.

Her husband Eliot remains high-minded and oblivious. He eats popcorn while she cleans vigorously and states he has no desire to own her. In her mind, Cora pictures herself trying to survive a rustic life together, washing clothes on a stone while he searches for chanterelles. She longs for excitement, some moral abandon, a partner who will plead, and worship, and “express raw admiration for her prowess”.

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

The Trouble with Over-Intellectualized Desire

The trouble is that Cora is just as intellectually constrained as her husband, and unable to surrender to primal passion. It’s “too much to ask her to be passionate” (regarding her career, she says, but in truth, about all aspects of life). What she feels for Sam are “bland, liking-adjacent”. She wants “a transcendent physical experience and escape her own reality momentarily”. But, for years, Sam demurs while Cora languishes. She imagines a parallel reality alongside her real life, where in place of chores and errands, she has passion, luxury, and her imagined lover. When her fictional romance fizzles, she imagines “a Gallic character called Baptiste” who teams up with Sam in assisting her from the tub, “nothing for her to do, no responsibilities, no requirements, other than to be revered as a youthful bride, tragically lost to illness”.

A Disappointing Climax and Deeper Themes

When they finally do give in to temptation, the sex is sad, lacking in fun or mutual connection. It isn’t the sepia-toned romance she fantasized about for 10 years. Cora dons an alluring gown and Sam “stoically eat[s] her out within their rented space” before dinner. One imagines that Cora wants to slip inside a certain type of literary world, where sex is sordid and confusing, where the power dynamics are unequal, and characters act out, and nobody keeps score.

Throughout the novel the core issue for Cora: she has such cutting wit, but so little joy. Regarding an intimate picture from Sam, Cora critiques, “he has clenched his abs and made sure he was hard, but has not cleared the frame of Crocs”. Given that the catalyst 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 adults fumble. They start with babies then acknowledge that sex isn’t always about babies. Eliot mentions a penis then concedes that one isn’t required. Finally, he lands on, “you know genitals?”

Beneath the story flows a quiet theme of common existential queries of midlife: is there purpose to our existence? What follows our final breath? These themes are more explicit in Cora's internal dialogues. Considering these passages, the reader may ponder what moral Cora and her jaded circle would take 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 in the middle of a podcast about rope, Cora thinks “all meaningful communication is compromised by specific context”. 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.

A Final Assessment

The result is a razor-sharp, uproariously funny, exquisitely detailed novel, written with such withering exactitude. It is absolutely aware of itself, economical yet rich with implication: a portrait of an anxious, loin-girding generation entering midlife, perpetually self-conscious, at once afraid of and desperate for sensation. Perhaps this is solely a metropolitan trait. Let’s say it is.