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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 type of romance from another era from a bygone kind of man. Sadly, for Cora, morality in 2015 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 “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 downwardly mobile New Yorkers. It stands as the definitive narrative of middle-aged unfaithfulness this current cohort deserves: an energetic, clever critique of insufferable hand-wringers who’ve somehow spoiled intimacy itself.

Depicting Self-Satisfied Discontent

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 to the suburbs. Caught in the “exhausting constant demands” of raising children, they have desk jobs, two children, and an ongoing fungal issue proliferating beneath their bathroom tiles that they lack the energy and money to sort out. Their social circle other smug, overeducated Brooklynites who have escaped the metropolis to drink negronis from rustic glassware and critique one another amidst a more rural setting. Yet Cora's isolation here, it’s not because her fussy, lifeless lens but because her new neighbours are “dull and vain, duller and vainer than they were back in the city”.

Eliot is intellectually lofty and utterly unaware. He snacks casually as she scrubs the oven and states he has no desire to own her. In her mind, Cora pictures them attempting to endure with Eliot in the woods, washing clothes on a stone while he searches for chanterelles. She deeply desires excitement, some moral abandon, a partner who will beg, and worship, and “growl at the feet of the woman’s excellence”.

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

The Trouble with Over-Intellectualized Longing

The central conflict 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" (regarding her career, she says, but in truth, about all aspects of life). What she feels for Sam are “bland, liking-adjacent”. She wants “a transcendent physical experience and escape her own reality momentarily”. Yet, for a decade, Sam demurs while Cora pines. She imagines a parallel reality alongside her real life, where instead of bills and school pickups, she has passion, luxury, and her imagined lover. As this fantasy dims, her mind conjures “a Gallic character called Baptiste” who joins Sam in assisting her from the tub, “nothing for her to do, no tasks, no requirements, except to be worshipped as a youthful bride, who’d died improbably of TB”.

A Sad Conclusion and Deeper Themes

When they finally do give in to their desires, the sex is sad, without much play or complicity. It fails to be the sepia-toned romance she fantasized about for 10 years. Cora dons a slinky dress and Sam “performs oral sex with grim determination in their hotel room” prior to a meal. One imagines that Cora desires to slip inside a certain type of literary world, where intimacy is messy and ambiguous, where imbalances of control exist, and characters act out, and nobody keeps score.

Somers consistently suggests the root of Cora’s problem: she possesses a sharp tongue, but so little joy. Of Sam’s erotic photo, Cora critiques, “he has clenched his abs and ensured he was aroused, but has not cleared the frame of Crocs”. Given that the catalyst 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 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?”

Underpinning the narrative runs the subtle undercurrent of familiar middle-age questions: is there purpose to our existence? Where do we go after death? These ideas are more directly explored in Cora's internal dialogues. Reading these exchanges, one wonders what moral Cora and her cynical lot would take from their disappointing dramas. 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 thinks “all meaningful communication is compromised by specific context”. Others could argue it's enriched. 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 Appraisal

The result is a razor-sharp, uproariously funny, exquisitely detailed novel, written with such withering exactitude. It is absolutely aware of itself, economical yet rich with implication: a portrait of an anxious, loin-girding generation in middle age, chronically embarrassed, simultaneously terrified of and hungry for intense experience. Or maybe that’s just the New Yorkers. Let’s say it is.