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Within the novel by Erin Somers The Ten Year Affair, we meet a millennial mother named Cora, a woman in her prime who desperately wants a bygone kind of passion from a man of a different time. Sadly, for Cora, the modern ethical landscape is inflexible and jaded, so rather than embarking on the affair, Cora spends 10 years overthinking it, fantasising about it and discussing it with the object of her desire, Sam – a father from her child's circle who works as “head narrative architect” at a fintech company. The book positions itself as a comic take on the traditional tale of infidelity and a sharp satire of a particular, self-aware clique of downwardly mobile 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 somehow spoiled even sex.

A Portrait of Self-Satisfied Discontent

The central couple, Cora and Eliot are highly educated, somewhat arrogant former city dwellers who, as costs increased and their family expanded, have relocated with hesitation upstate. Caught in the “exhausting constant demands” of parenthood, they juggle 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. 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 here, it stems not from her fussy, lifeless lens but because her suburban peers 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 while she cleans vigorously and says he doesn’t wish to possess her. In her mind, Cora pictures them attempting to endure with Eliot in the woods, washing clothes on a stone while he forages for mushrooms. She deeply desires drama, some moral abandon, a lover who will beg, and adore, and “express raw admiration for her prowess”.

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

The Trouble with Over-Intellectualized 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 claims, but really about everything). Her feelings for Sam are “tepid, barely beyond simple fondness”. She craves “a transcendent physical experience and not think about her life for a second”. But, for years, Sam refuses while Cora pines. She constructs 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 teams up with Sam in assisting her from the tub, “leaving her with no duties, no responsibilities, no obligations, except to be worshipped as a youthful bride, tragically lost to illness”.

A Sad Climax and Deeper Themes

When they finally do give in to temptation, their intimacy is melancholy, lacking in fun or mutual connection. It isn’t the nostalgically perfect affair she fantasized about 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 certain type of literary world, 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 a profound lack of happiness. Regarding an intimate picture from Sam, Cora complains, “he has clenched his abs and made sure he was hard, but failed to remove his casual footwear from the shot”. Given that the catalyst that diminished their pleasure was parenthood, one worries about what these idiots are doing to their children. As her daughter inquires about sex, the parents stumble. They start with babies then acknowledge that sex isn’t always about babies. Eliot mentions a penis then admits it is not essential. Ultimately, he settles for, “you're aware of private parts?”

Beneath the story flows a quiet theme of familiar middle-age questions: do our lives have meaning? What follows our final breath? These themes are more explicit in Cora’s imagined conversations. Considering these passages, one wonders what lesson Cora and her cynical lot would take 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 thinks “all meaningful communication is undermined by its particulars”. Others could argue it's enriched. Yet that is not her nature, and the author refuses to grant her character false epiphanies, or force growth beyond her capacity.

A Final Assessment

This is an incisive, hilarious, exquisitely detailed novel, written with devastating precision. 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. Let’s say it is.