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Within Erin Somers’s The Ten Year Affair, the story centers on Cora, a millennial mother who desperately wants a bygone kind of passion with a bygone kind of man. Unfortunately for her, the modern ethical landscape is inflexible and jaded, and instead of having the affair, Cora devotes a full decade obsessively analyzing it, daydreaming of it and talking it over with her potential lover, Sam – a father from her child's circle who works as “chief storytelling officer” at a mortgage start-up. This novel positions itself as a comic take on the classic adultery novel and a sharp satire of a narrow, self-conscious group of downwardly mobile New Yorkers. One could call it the midlife adultery story this current cohort has coming: a propulsive, witty takedown of unbearably anxious individuals who’ve somehow spoiled intimacy itself.

Depicting Self-Satisfied Unhappiness

The central couple, Cora and Eliot are highly educated, somewhat arrogant former city dwellers who, with rents rising and children growing, have relocated with hesitation upstate. Caught in the “gruelling all-the-time-ness” of raising children, they have office careers, two children, and a persistent mushroom proliferating beneath their bathroom tiles which they cannot afford or muster the will to fix. Their social circle similarly minded urban exiles who have escaped the metropolis to drink negronis out of mason jars and critique one another amidst a more rural setting. Yet Cora's isolation here, it’s not because her fussy, lifeless lens 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 them attempting to endure a rustic life together, doing laundry by hand while he searches for chanterelles. She deeply desires drama, some moral abandon, a partner who will plead, and adore, and “express raw admiration for her prowess”.

"The shabbiness of real life, you had to admire its consistency."

The Problem of High-Minded Longing

The central conflict 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 claims, but really about everything). Her feelings for Sam are “tepid, barely beyond simple fondness”. She wants “to get fucked into the astral plane and escape her own reality momentarily”. Yet, for a decade, Sam demurs while Cora languishes. She constructs an alternate timeline running concurrent to her actual existence, where in place of chores and errands, she has passion, luxury, and her imagined lover. As this fantasy dims, her mind conjures “a Gallic character called Baptiste” who teams up with Sam in assisting her from the tub, “leaving her with no duties, no responsibilities, no obligations, other than to be revered as a youthful bride, tragically lost to illness”.

A Disappointing Conclusion and Undercurrents

When they eventually succumb to temptation, the sex is sad, lacking in fun or mutual connection. It fails to be the sepia-toned romance she fantasized about for a full decade. Cora dons a slinky dress and Sam “stoically eat[s] her out in their hotel room” before dinner. One imagines that Cora desires to slip inside a James Salter novel, where sex is sordid and confusing, where imbalances of control exist, and everyone misbehaves, and no one tallies the cost.

Somers consistently suggests the root of Cora’s problem: she possesses a sharp tongue, but so little joy. Of Sam’s erotic photo, Cora complains, “he tightened his stomach and ensured he was aroused, but has not cleared the frame of Crocs”. Given that the catalyst that diminished their pleasure was having children, one worries 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 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 flows a quiet theme 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 internal dialogues. Reading these exchanges, one wonders what moral Cora and her jaded circle would derive from their unsatisfying escapades. Would Cora grow more open to 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 undermined by its particulars”. Some might say enhanced. But that’s not Cora, and the author refuses to grant the protagonist easy revelations, or stretch her where she is unable to go.

An Ultimate Appraisal

The result is an incisive, hilarious, finely observed novel, written with such withering exactitude. It is absolutely aware of itself, economical yet rich with implication: a portrait of a worried, self-protective cohort in middle age, chronically embarrassed, at once afraid of and desperate for sensation. Perhaps this is solely a metropolitan trait. Let’s say it is.