🔗 Share this article

Within Erin Somers’s The Ten Year Affair, the story centers on a millennial mother named Cora, a millennial mother who desperately wants 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 10 years overthinking it, daydreaming of it and discussing it with the object of her desire, Sam – a father from her child's circle who holds the title “head narrative architect” at a mortgage start-up. The book positions itself as a humorous twist on the traditional tale of infidelity and a sharp satire of a particular, self-aware clique of downwardly mobile New Yorkers. One could call it the midlife adultery story our entire generation deserves: an energetic, clever critique of insufferable hand-wringers who’ve managed to ruin intimacy itself.

Depicting Smug Discontent

The central couple, Cora and Eliot are smug, overeducated Brooklynites who, with rents rising and children growing, have moved reluctantly upstate. Caught in the “exhausting constant demands” of parenthood, they have office careers, a pair of kids, and a persistent mushroom growing under their bathroom tiles which they cannot afford or muster the will to fix. Their social circle similarly minded urban exiles who have escaped the metropolis to drink negronis out of mason jars and judge each other amidst a more rural setting. But if Cora is lonely here, it stems not from her fussy, lifeless lens but because her new neighbours are “boring and self-absorbed, duller and vainer than they were back in the city”.

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 them attempting to endure with Eliot in the woods, doing laundry by hand while he searches for chanterelles. She longs for excitement, some moral abandon, a partner who will plead, and adore, and “express raw admiration for her prowess”.

"The shabbiness of real life, you had to admire its consistency."

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. She finds it "an overwhelming request to feel fervor" (regarding her career, she claims, 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 pines. She imagines an alternate timeline alongside her real life, where in place of chores and errands, she has sex and hotels and Sam. When her fictional romance fizzles, her mind conjures “a French guy named Baptiste” who teams up with Sam in helping her out of the bath, “leaving her with no duties, no tasks, no requirements, except to be worshipped like someone’s teenage wife, tragically lost to illness”.

A Sad Climax and Undercurrents

When they eventually succumb to temptation, the sex is sad, without much play or complicity. It fails to be the nostalgically perfect affair she dreamed up for 10 years. Cora dons a slinky dress and Sam “performs oral sex with grim determination within their rented space” before dinner. One imagines 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.

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 having children, one worries about the impact these flawed adults have on their kids. As her daughter inquires about sex, the parents stumble. They start with babies then acknowledge that sex isn’t always about babies. The father references male anatomy then concedes that one isn’t required. Finally, he lands on, “you're aware of private parts?”

Underpinning the narrative flows a quiet theme of common existential queries of midlife: is there purpose to our existence? Where do we go after death? These ideas are more explicit in Cora’s imagined conversations. Considering these passages, the reader may ponder what moral Cora and her cynical lot would take from their unsatisfying escapades. Might Cora become more open to life’s imperfect joys, its sentimental delights? When Eliot asks about her affair in the middle of a podcast about rope, Cora reflects “all meaningful communication is compromised by specific context”. Some might say enhanced. Yet that is not her nature, and the author refuses to grant her character false epiphanies, or stretch her where she is unable to go.

An Ultimate Assessment

This is an incisive, hilarious, exquisitely detailed novel, crafted with devastating precision. It is profoundly self-aware, spare and brimming with subtext: a depiction of a worried, self-protective cohort entering midlife, chronically embarrassed, at once afraid of and desperate for sensation. Perhaps this is solely a metropolitan trait. Let’s say it is.