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Within Erin Somers’s The Ten Year Affair, the story centers on Cora, a woman in her prime who desperately wants a bygone kind of passion from a bygone kind of man. Sadly, for Cora, the modern ethical landscape is rigid and cynical, 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 playgroup dad who holds the title “chief storytelling officer” 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 particular, self-aware clique 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.

Depicting Self-Satisfied 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. Caught in 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. Their social circle other smug, overeducated Brooklynites who have escaped the metropolis to drink negronis out of mason jars and judge each other closer to nature. Yet Cora's isolation here, it stems not from 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 states he has no desire to own her. Cora imagines them attempting to endure a rustic life together, doing laundry by hand while he searches for chanterelles. She deeply desires drama, a bit of depravity, a lover who will plead, and worship, and “express raw admiration for her prowess”.

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

The Problem of High-Minded Desire

The trouble is that she’s as high-minded and rigid as Eliot, and unable to surrender to primal passion. She finds it "an overwhelming request to feel fervor" (about work, she says, but really about everything). What she feels for Sam are “tepid, barely beyond simple fondness”. She wants “a transcendent physical experience and not think about her life for a second”. Yet, for a decade, Sam demurs while Cora pines. She imagines an alternate timeline running concurrent to her actual existence, where instead of bills and school pickups, she has sex and hotels and Sam. When her fictional romance fizzles, her mind conjures “a Gallic character called Baptiste” who joins Sam in assisting her from the tub, “leaving her with no duties, no tasks, no requirements, other than to be revered as a youthful bride, who’d died improbably of TB”.

A Disappointing Climax and Undercurrents

When they finally do give in to their desires, their intimacy is melancholy, without much play or complicity. It isn’t the nostalgically perfect affair she dreamed up for a full decade. Cora puts on an alluring gown and Sam “stoically eat[s] her out in their hotel room” before dinner. The reader senses that Cora wants to slip inside a James Salter novel, where intimacy is messy and ambiguous, where imbalances of control exist, and everyone misbehaves, 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 has clenched his abs and made sure he was hard, but has not cleared the frame of Crocs”. Given that the catalyst that diminished their pleasure 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 begin with procreation then acknowledge that sex isn’t always about babies. Eliot mentions a penis then concedes that one isn’t required. Ultimately, he settles for, “you know genitals?”

Beneath the story runs the subtle undercurrent of common existential queries of midlife: is there purpose to our existence? What follows our final breath? These themes are more directly explored in Cora’s imagined conversations. Reading these exchanges, one wonders what moral Cora and her jaded circle would take from their unsatisfying escapades. Might Cora become more receptive of life’s imperfect joys, its corny pleasures? Upon being questioned by Eliot about her affair in the middle of a podcast about rope, Cora reflects “every serious exchange is undermined by its particulars”. Some might say enhanced. Yet that is not her nature, and Somers doesn’t give her character false epiphanies, or stretch her where she is unable to go.

A Final Assessment

This is a razor-sharp, hilarious, finely observed novel, written with such withering exactitude. It is profoundly self-aware, spare and brimming with subtext: a depiction of an anxious, loin-girding generation in middle age, chronically embarrassed, simultaneously terrified of and hungry for intense experience. Perhaps this is solely a metropolitan trait. Let’s say it is.