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In the novel by Erin Somers The Ten Year Affair, the story centers on a millennial mother named Cora, a millennial mother who desperately wants a bygone kind of passion from a man of a different time. Unfortunately for her, morality in 2015 is rigid and cynical, and instead of having the affair, Cora devotes 10 years obsessively analyzing it, fantasising about it and talking it over with her potential lover, Sam – a father from her child's circle who works as “head narrative architect” at a fintech company. The book presents itself as a humorous twist on the traditional tale of infidelity and a send-up of a particular, self-aware clique of economically slipping New Yorkers. One could call it the definitive narrative of middle-aged unfaithfulness this current cohort has coming: an energetic, clever critique 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 moved reluctantly upstate. Trapped by the “gruelling all-the-time-ness” of raising children, they have desk jobs, two children, and an ongoing fungal issue growing under their bathroom tiles which they cannot afford or muster the will to fix. They spend time with similarly minded urban exiles who have fled the city to drink negronis from rustic glassware and critique one another amidst a more rural setting. Yet Cora's isolation in this new environment, it’s not because her own critical, joyless perspective but because her new neighbours are “dull and vain, duller and vainer than they were back in the city”.

Her husband Eliot remains high-minded and oblivious. He eats popcorn while she cleans vigorously and says he doesn’t wish to possess her. In her mind, Cora pictures herself trying to survive with Eliot in the woods, washing clothes on a stone while he forages for mushrooms. She deeply desires drama, a bit of depravity, 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 Longing

The central conflict is that Cora is just as intellectually constrained as her husband, and unable to surrender to primal passion. She finds it "an overwhelming request to feel fervor" (about work, she says, but in truth, about all aspects of life). Her feelings for Sam are “tepid, barely beyond simple fondness”. She wants “a transcendent physical experience and escape her own reality momentarily”. But, for years, Sam refuses while Cora languishes. She constructs a parallel reality alongside her real life, where in place of chores and errands, she has passion, luxury, and her imagined lover. As this fantasy dims, her mind conjures “a French guy named Baptiste” who joins Sam in helping her out of the bath, “leaving her with no duties, no responsibilities, no obligations, other than to be revered like someone’s teenage wife, tragically lost to illness”.

A Sad Climax and Deeper Themes

When they finally do give in to temptation, the sex is sad, without much play or complicity. It isn’t the sepia-toned romance she fantasized about for a full decade. Cora puts on an alluring gown and Sam “performs oral sex with grim determination in their hotel room” prior to a meal. The reader senses that Cora desires to slip inside a James Salter novel, where sex is sordid and confusing, where the power dynamics are unequal, and characters act out, and nobody keeps score.

Somers consistently suggests the root of Cora’s problem: she has such cutting wit, but a profound lack of happiness. Of Sam’s erotic photo, Cora complains, “he tightened his stomach and made sure he was hard, but failed to remove his casual footwear from the shot”. Since the event that killed their fun was having children, readers may fret about what these idiots are doing to their children. As her daughter inquires about sex, the parents stumble. They start with babies then acknowledge that sex isn’t always about babies. Eliot mentions a penis then admits it is not essential. Ultimately, he settles for, “you know genitals?”

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 themes are more explicit in Cora's internal dialogues. Considering these passages, one wonders what lesson Cora and her cynical lot would take from their unsatisfying escapades. Would Cora grow more receptive of life’s flawed pleasures, its sentimental delights? Upon being questioned by Eliot about her affair in the middle of a podcast about rope, Cora thinks “every serious exchange is compromised by specific context”. Others could argue it's enriched. Yet that is not her nature, and Somers doesn’t give the protagonist easy revelations, or force growth beyond her capacity.

A Final Appraisal

This is a razor-sharp, hilarious, finely observed novel, crafted with such withering exactitude. It is profoundly self-aware, spare and brimming with subtext: a depiction of a worried, self-protective cohort in middle age, chronically embarrassed, simultaneously terrified of and hungry for intense experience. Or maybe that’s just the New Yorkers. Let’s say it is.