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In Erin Somers’s 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. Sadly, for Cora, the modern ethical landscape is rigid and cynical, and instead of having the affair, Cora spends a full decade obsessively analyzing it, fantasising about it and discussing it with her potential lover, Sam – a playgroup dad who works as “head narrative architect” at a mortgage start-up. The book presents itself as a humorous twist on the traditional tale of infidelity and a sharp satire of a particular, self-aware clique of economically slipping 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 Smug Unhappiness

The central couple, Cora and Eliot are smug, overeducated Brooklynites who, as costs increased and their family expanded, have moved reluctantly to the suburbs. Trapped by the “exhausting constant demands” of parenthood, they have office careers, a pair of kids, and an ongoing fungal issue proliferating beneath their bathroom tiles that they lack the energy and money to sort out. Their social circle other smug, overeducated Brooklynites who have fled the city to drink negronis out of mason jars and judge each other closer to nature. But if Cora is lonely here, it’s not because her fussy, lifeless lens but because her suburban peers are “dull and vain, 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 with Eliot in the woods, doing laundry by hand while he forages for mushrooms. She deeply desires excitement, some moral abandon, a lover who will plead, and adore, and “express raw admiration for her prowess”.

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

The Trouble with Over-Intellectualized Longing

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 claims, but really about everything). What she feels 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 refuses while Cora pines. She imagines an alternate timeline running concurrent to her actual existence, where instead of bills and school pickups, she has passion, luxury, and her imagined lover. When her fictional romance fizzles, her mind conjures “a French guy named Baptiste” who joins Sam in helping her out of the bath, “nothing for her to do, no tasks, no obligations, except to be worshipped as a youthful bride, tragically lost to illness”.

A Sad Conclusion and Deeper Themes

When they eventually succumb to temptation, their intimacy is melancholy, without much play or complicity. It fails to be the sepia-toned romance she dreamed up for a full decade. Cora dons a slinky dress and Sam “stoically eat[s] her out in their hotel room” prior to a meal. The reader senses that Cora desires to slip inside a certain type of literary world, where sex is sordid and confusing, where imbalances of control exist, and characters act out, and nobody keeps score.

Throughout the novel the root of Cora’s problem: she possesses a sharp tongue, but so little joy. Of Sam’s erotic photo, Cora critiques, “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 the impact these flawed adults have on their kids. As her daughter inquires about sex, the adults fumble. They begin with procreation then concede that sex serves other purposes. Eliot mentions a penis then admits it is not essential. 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 themes are more directly explored in Cora’s imagined conversations. Considering these passages, the reader may ponder what moral Cora and her cynical lot would derive from their disappointing dramas. Might Cora become more receptive of life’s flawed pleasures, its sentimental delights? Upon being questioned by Eliot about her affair during an audio program on bondage, Cora reflects “all meaningful communication is compromised by specific context”. Others could argue it's enriched. But that’s not Cora, and the author refuses to grant the protagonist easy revelations, or force growth beyond her capacity.

A Final Appraisal

The result is a razor-sharp, uproariously funny, finely observed novel, crafted with such withering exactitude. It is absolutely aware of itself, economical yet rich with implication: a depiction of a worried, self-protective cohort in middle age, chronically embarrassed, at once afraid of and desperate for sensation. Or maybe that’s just the New Yorkers. Let’s say it is.