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In the novel by Erin Somers The Ten Year Affair, the story centers on Cora, a millennial mother who desperately wants a bygone kind of passion with a man of a different time. Sadly, for Cora, the modern ethical landscape is inflexible and jaded, so rather than embarking on the affair, Cora spends a full decade obsessively analyzing it, fantasising about it and talking it over with the object of her desire, Sam – a playgroup dad who works as “head narrative architect” at a fintech company. This novel presents itself as a humorous twist on the classic adultery novel and a send-up of a particular, self-aware clique of economically slipping New Yorkers. It stands as the definitive narrative of middle-aged unfaithfulness our entire generation has coming: an energetic, clever critique of unbearably anxious individuals who’ve somehow spoiled even sex.

A Portrait of Smug Discontent

The central couple, Cora and Eliot are smug, overeducated Brooklynites who, as costs increased and their family expanded, have moved reluctantly upstate. Trapped by the “gruelling all-the-time-ness” of raising children, they have desk jobs, a pair of kids, and an ongoing fungal issue growing under their bathroom tiles that they lack the energy and money to sort out. They spend time with similarly minded urban exiles who have escaped the metropolis to drink negronis from rustic glassware and judge each other amidst a more rural setting. Yet Cora's isolation here, it stems not from her fussy, lifeless lens but because her suburban peers are “dull and vain, duller and vainer than they were back in the city”.

Eliot is intellectually lofty and utterly unaware. He snacks casually while she cleans vigorously and says he doesn’t wish to possess her. In her mind, Cora pictures herself trying to survive a rustic life together, doing laundry by hand while he searches for chanterelles. She deeply desires drama, some moral abandon, a lover who will beg, and adore, and “express raw admiration for her prowess”.

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

The Trouble with Over-Intellectualized Longing

The trouble is that Cora is just as intellectually constrained as her husband, and incapable of that kind of abandon herself. It’s “too much to ask her to be passionate” (regarding her career, she says, but really about everything). What she feels for Sam are “bland, liking-adjacent”. She wants “to get fucked into the astral plane and escape her own reality momentarily”. Yet, for a decade, Sam refuses while Cora pines. 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 Gallic character called Baptiste” who joins Sam in helping her out of the bath, “leaving her with no duties, no tasks, no requirements, other than to be revered like someone’s teenage wife, who’d died improbably of TB”.

A Disappointing Climax and Undercurrents

When they finally do give in to temptation, the sex is sad, without much play or complicity. It fails to be the nostalgically perfect affair she fantasized about for 10 years. Cora dons a slinky dress and Sam “stoically eat[s] her out in their hotel room” before dinner. The reader senses that Cora desires to inhabit 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.

Somers consistently suggests the core issue for Cora: she has such cutting wit, but so little joy. Of Sam’s erotic photo, 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 the impact these flawed adults have on their kids. As her daughter inquires about sex, the parents stumble. They begin with procreation then acknowledge that sex isn’t always about babies. The father references male anatomy then admits it is not essential. Finally, he lands on, “you're aware of private parts?”

Underpinning the narrative runs the subtle undercurrent of familiar middle-age questions: is there purpose to our existence? What follows our final breath? These themes are more explicit in Cora’s imagined conversations. Considering these passages, one wonders what moral Cora and her cynical lot would take from their disappointing dramas. Would Cora grow more receptive of life’s imperfect joys, its sentimental delights? Upon being questioned by Eliot about her affair during an audio program on bondage, Cora thinks “all meaningful communication is compromised by specific context”. Some might say enhanced. Yet that is not her nature, and the author refuses to grant her character false epiphanies, or stretch her where she is unable to go.

A Final Assessment

The result is an incisive, uproariously funny, 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 in middle age, perpetually self-conscious, at once afraid of and desperate for sensation. Perhaps this is solely a metropolitan trait. Let’s say it is.