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In the novel by Erin Somers The Ten Year Affair, we meet Cora, a millennial mother who yearns for a bygone kind of passion with a bygone kind of man. Sadly, for Cora, the modern ethical landscape is inflexible and jaded, and instead of having the affair, Cora spends 10 years overthinking 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 fintech company. The book positions itself as a humorous twist on the classic adultery novel and a sharp satire of a narrow, self-conscious group of economically slipping New Yorkers. One could call it the midlife adultery story our entire generation deserves: an energetic, clever critique of unbearably anxious individuals who’ve managed to ruin even sex.

A Portrait of Smug 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. Trapped by the “exhausting constant demands” of raising children, they have office careers, two children, and an ongoing fungal issue growing under their bathroom tiles that they lack the energy and money to sort out. They spend time with 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. Yet Cora's isolation in this new environment, it stems not from her fussy, lifeless lens 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 eats popcorn as she scrubs the oven and says he doesn’t wish to possess her. Cora imagines herself trying to survive a rustic life together, washing clothes on a stone while he searches for chanterelles. She deeply desires drama, a bit of depravity, a partner who will plead, and worship, and “express raw admiration for her prowess”.

"The mundane grind of everyday existence, one must acknowledge its relentless predictability."

The Trouble with High-Minded Desire

The central conflict is that she’s as high-minded and rigid as Eliot, and incapable of that kind of abandon herself. It’s “too much to ask her to be passionate” (regarding her career, she says, but in truth, about all aspects of life). Her feelings for Sam are “tepid, barely beyond simple fondness”. She craves “to get fucked into the astral plane and escape her own reality momentarily”. But, for years, Sam demurs while Cora languishes. She constructs an alternate timeline running concurrent to her actual existence, where instead of bills and school pickups, she has sex and hotels and Sam. As this fantasy dims, she imagines “a French guy named Baptiste” who teams up with Sam in assisting her from the tub, “leaving her with no duties, no responsibilities, no obligations, except to be worshipped like someone’s teenage wife, who’d died improbably of TB”.

A Disappointing 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 sepia-toned romance 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. One imagines that Cora wants to slip inside a James Salter novel, where intimacy is messy and ambiguous, 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 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 killed their fun was parenthood, one worries about what these idiots are doing to their children. As her daughter inquires about sex, the adults fumble. They begin with procreation 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?”

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 explicit in Cora's internal dialogues. Considering these passages, the reader may ponder what moral Cora and her jaded circle would derive from their unsatisfying escapades. Would Cora grow 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 undermined by its particulars”. Others could argue it's enriched. But that’s not Cora, and Somers doesn’t give her character false epiphanies, or force growth beyond her capacity.

An Ultimate Appraisal

This is a razor-sharp, uproariously funny, exquisitely detailed novel, crafted with devastating precision. It is absolutely aware of itself, economical yet rich with implication: a portrait of a worried, self-protective cohort entering midlife, perpetually self-conscious, at once afraid of and desperate for sensation. Or maybe that’s just the New Yorkers. Let’s say it is.