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Within Erin Somers’s The Ten Year Affair, the story centers on Cora, a millennial mother who craves a bygone kind of passion from a bygone kind of man. Sadly, for Cora, morality in 2015 is rigid and cynical, so rather than embarking on the affair, Cora spends 10 years obsessively analyzing it, daydreaming of it and talking it over with her potential lover, Sam – a playgroup dad who holds the title “head narrative architect” at a fintech company. This novel positions itself as a comic take on the classic adultery novel and a send-up of a particular, self-aware clique of downwardly mobile New Yorkers. One could call it the midlife adultery story our entire generation has coming: an energetic, clever critique of unbearably anxious individuals who’ve somehow spoiled intimacy itself.

Depicting Smug Discontent

Cora and her husband Eliot are smug, overeducated Brooklynites who, as costs increased and their family expanded, have moved reluctantly to the suburbs. Caught in the “exhausting constant demands” of raising children, they juggle office careers, a pair of kids, and a persistent mushroom 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 escaped the metropolis to drink negronis from rustic glassware and judge each other amidst a more rural setting. But if Cora is lonely here, it stems not from her own critical, joyless perspective but because her new neighbours are “dull and vain, even more so than in their previous urban life”.

Her husband Eliot remains intellectually lofty and utterly unaware. He snacks casually as she scrubs the oven 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 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 Problem of Over-Intellectualized Desire

The central conflict 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 claims, but in truth, about all aspects of life). 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 demurs 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 French guy named Baptiste” who teams up with Sam in helping her out of the bath, “nothing for her to do, no tasks, no requirements, except to be worshipped like someone’s teenage wife, tragically lost to illness”.

A Disappointing Climax and Undercurrents

When they finally do give in to their desires, their intimacy is melancholy, without much play or complicity. It fails to be the nostalgically perfect affair she dreamed up for a full decade. Cora dons an alluring gown and Sam “stoically eat[s] her out within their rented space” prior to a meal. One imagines that Cora desires to slip inside a James Salter novel, where intimacy is messy and ambiguous, where the power dynamics are unequal, and characters act out, and no one tallies the cost.

Somers consistently suggests the core issue for Cora: she has such cutting wit, but a profound lack of happiness. Regarding an intimate picture from Sam, Cora complains, “he tightened his stomach and ensured he was aroused, but has not cleared the frame of Crocs”. Since the event that killed their fun was having children, one worries about what these idiots are doing to their children. When Cora’s daughter asks about sex, the parents stumble. They start with babies then concede that sex isn’t always about babies. The father references male anatomy then admits it is not essential. Ultimately, he settles for, “you're aware of private parts?”

Beneath the story runs the subtle undercurrent of common existential queries of midlife: do our lives have meaning? Where do we go after death? These ideas are more directly explored in Cora’s imagined conversations. Reading these exchanges, one wonders what lesson Cora and her jaded circle would derive from their disappointing dramas. Might Cora become 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 “every serious exchange is compromised by specific context”. Some might say enhanced. But that’s not Cora, and Somers doesn’t give her character false epiphanies, or stretch her where she is unable to go.

An Ultimate Assessment

This is a razor-sharp, hilarious, exquisitely detailed novel, crafted with devastating precision. It is absolutely aware of itself, economical yet rich with implication: a portrait of an anxious, loin-girding generation entering midlife, chronically embarrassed, at once afraid of and desperate for sensation. Or maybe that’s just the New Yorkers. Let’s say it is.