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In Erin Somers’s The Ten Year Affair, we meet Cora, a millennial mother who craves a type of romance from another era from a bygone kind of man. Unfortunately for her, morality in 2015 is rigid and cynical, and instead of having the affair, Cora spends 10 years obsessively analyzing it, daydreaming of it and talking it over with the object of her desire, Sam – a father from her child's circle who works as “head narrative architect” at a fintech company. This novel positions itself as a comic take on the classic adultery novel and a send-up of a particular, self-aware clique of downwardly mobile New Yorkers. It stands as the definitive narrative of middle-aged unfaithfulness this current cohort deserves: an energetic, clever critique of unbearably anxious individuals who’ve somehow spoiled even sex.

Depicting Self-Satisfied Unhappiness

Cora and her husband Eliot are highly educated, somewhat arrogant former city dwellers who, with rents rising and children growing, have relocated with hesitation upstate. Caught in the “gruelling all-the-time-ness” of raising children, they juggle office careers, 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 other smug, overeducated Brooklynites who have fled the city to sip craft cocktails from rustic glassware and critique one another amidst a more rural setting. But if Cora is lonely in this new environment, it stems not from her own critical, joyless perspective but because her new neighbours are “dull and vain, even more so than in their previous urban life”.

Eliot is high-minded and oblivious. He snacks casually while she cleans vigorously and states he has no desire to own her. In her mind, Cora pictures herself trying to survive a rustic life together, washing clothes on a stone while he forages for mushrooms. She deeply desires drama, some moral abandon, 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 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" (regarding her career, she says, but in truth, about all aspects of life). Her feelings for Sam are “bland, liking-adjacent”. She craves “a transcendent physical experience and escape her own reality momentarily”. But, for years, Sam refuses while Cora pines. She imagines a parallel reality running concurrent to her actual existence, where in place of chores and errands, she has sex and hotels and Sam. As this fantasy dims, she imagines “a Gallic character called 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, who’d died improbably of TB”.

A Disappointing Climax and Deeper Themes

When they eventually succumb to their desires, the sex is sad, lacking in fun or mutual connection. It fails to be the nostalgically perfect affair she fantasized about for 10 years. Cora dons an alluring gown and Sam “performs oral sex with grim determination within their rented space” before dinner. One imagines that Cora wants to inhabit a certain type of literary world, where intimacy is messy and ambiguous, where the power dynamics are unequal, and characters act out, and no one tallies the cost.

Somers consistently suggests the core issue for Cora: she possesses a sharp tongue, but so little joy. Regarding an intimate picture from Sam, Cora critiques, “he tightened his stomach and ensured he was aroused, but has not cleared the frame of Crocs”. Since the event that diminished their pleasure was parenthood, one worries about the impact these flawed adults have on their kids. When Cora’s daughter asks about sex, the adults fumble. They start with babies then acknowledge that sex serves other purposes. Eliot mentions a penis then concedes that one isn’t required. Finally, he lands on, “you know genitals?”

Underpinning the narrative flows a quiet theme 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 moral Cora and her jaded circle would take from their disappointing dramas. Would Cora grow more open to life’s flawed pleasures, its sentimental delights? Upon being questioned by Eliot about her affair in the middle of a podcast about rope, Cora reflects “all meaningful communication 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

The result is a razor-sharp, uproariously funny, exquisitely detailed novel, crafted with such withering exactitude. It is absolutely aware of itself, economical yet rich with implication: a portrait of a worried, self-protective cohort in middle age, chronically embarrassed, at once afraid of and desperate for sensation. Perhaps this is solely a metropolitan trait. Let’s say it is.