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Within Erin Somers’s The Ten Year Affair, the story centers on Cora, a woman in her prime who yearns for a bygone kind of passion with a bygone kind of man. Unfortunately for her, the modern ethical landscape is rigid and cynical, so rather than embarking on the affair, Cora devotes a full decade obsessively analyzing it, fantasising about it and talking it over with her potential lover, Sam – a playgroup dad who holds the title “head narrative architect” at a mortgage start-up. This novel positions itself as a humorous twist on the traditional tale of infidelity and a sharp satire of a narrow, self-conscious group of economically slipping New Yorkers. It stands as the definitive narrative of middle-aged unfaithfulness our entire generation has coming: a propulsive, witty takedown of unbearably anxious individuals who’ve managed to ruin intimacy itself.

A Portrait of Self-Satisfied Unhappiness

The central couple, Cora and Eliot are smug, overeducated Brooklynites who, with rents rising and children growing, have moved reluctantly to the suburbs. Trapped by the “exhausting constant demands” of raising children, they juggle office careers, two children, and a persistent mushroom 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 sip craft cocktails from rustic glassware and judge each other amidst a more rural setting. But if Cora is lonely in this new environment, it’s not because her fussy, lifeless lens but because her suburban peers are “boring and self-absorbed, 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 states he has no desire to own her. Cora imagines them attempting to endure with Eliot in the woods, doing laundry by hand while he searches for chanterelles. She deeply desires drama, a bit of depravity, a partner who will plead, and adore, and “express raw admiration for her prowess”.

"The mundane grind of everyday existence, you had to admire its consistency."

The Trouble with High-Minded Desire

The trouble 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). What she feels for Sam are “bland, liking-adjacent”. She craves “to get fucked into the astral plane and not think about her life for a second”. But, for years, Sam demurs while Cora pines. She constructs a parallel reality alongside her real life, where instead of bills and school pickups, she has passion, luxury, and her imagined lover. As this fantasy dims, she imagines “a Gallic character called Baptiste” who teams up with Sam in helping her out of the bath, “leaving her with no duties, no responsibilities, no obligations, except to be worshipped as a youthful bride, who’d died improbably of TB”.

A Sad Climax and Deeper Themes

When they eventually succumb to their desires, their intimacy is melancholy, lacking in fun or mutual connection. It isn’t the nostalgically perfect affair she dreamed up for a full decade. Cora puts on an alluring gown and Sam “performs oral sex with grim determination in their hotel room” before dinner. The reader senses that Cora wants 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.

Throughout the novel the core issue for Cora: she possesses a sharp tongue, but a profound lack of happiness. Of Sam’s erotic photo, Cora critiques, “he tightened his stomach and made sure he was hard, but has not cleared the frame of Crocs”. Since the event that diminished their pleasure was parenthood, one worries about what these idiots are doing to their children. When Cora’s daughter asks about sex, the adults fumble. They begin with procreation then acknowledge that sex serves other purposes. 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: do our lives have meaning? What follows our final breath? These ideas are more directly explored in Cora’s imagined conversations. Reading these exchanges, one wonders what moral Cora and her jaded circle would derive from their unsatisfying escapades. Might Cora become more open to life’s flawed pleasures, its sentimental delights? Upon being questioned by Eliot about her affair during an audio program on bondage, Cora reflects “every serious exchange is compromised by specific context”. Some might say enhanced. Yet that is not her nature, and Somers doesn’t give her character false epiphanies, or force growth beyond her capacity.

A Final Assessment

The result is a razor-sharp, hilarious, finely observed novel, crafted with such withering exactitude. It is absolutely aware of itself, spare and brimming with subtext: a portrait of a worried, self-protective cohort entering midlife, perpetually self-conscious, at once afraid of and desperate for sensation. Perhaps this is solely a metropolitan trait. For the sake of argument, we'll assume so.