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Within the novel by Erin Somers The Ten Year Affair, the story centers on a millennial mother named Cora, a woman in her prime who craves a type of romance from another era from a man of a different time. Unfortunately for her, the modern ethical landscape is rigid and cynical, and instead of having the affair, Cora spends a full decade obsessively analyzing it, fantasising about it and talking it over with the object of her desire, Sam – a playgroup dad who works as “head narrative architect” at a mortgage start-up. The book positions itself as a humorous twist on the classic adultery novel and a send-up of a particular, self-aware clique of downwardly mobile New Yorkers. One could call it the definitive narrative of middle-aged unfaithfulness our entire generation deserves: an energetic, clever critique of unbearably anxious individuals who’ve somehow spoiled intimacy itself.

Depicting Self-Satisfied Discontent

Cora and her husband Eliot are highly educated, somewhat arrogant former city dwellers who, with rents rising and children growing, have moved reluctantly upstate. Trapped by the “exhausting constant demands” of raising children, they have desk jobs, a pair of kids, and a persistent mushroom growing under their bathroom tiles that they lack the energy and money to sort out. 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. Yet Cora's isolation in this new environment, it’s not because her fussy, lifeless lens but because her new neighbours are “boring and self-absorbed, even more so than in their previous urban life”.

Eliot is intellectually lofty and utterly unaware. He eats popcorn as she scrubs the oven and states he has no desire to own her. Cora imagines herself trying to survive a rustic life together, doing laundry by hand while he forages for mushrooms. She longs for excitement, a bit of depravity, a lover who will plead, and worship, and “express raw admiration for her prowess”.

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

The Problem of High-Minded Longing

The trouble 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 really about everything). Her feelings for Sam are “tepid, barely beyond simple fondness”. She craves “to get fucked into the astral plane and not think about her life for a second”. Yet, for a decade, Sam refuses while Cora languishes. 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, she imagines “a French guy named Baptiste” who teams up with Sam in assisting her from the tub, “leaving her with no duties, no tasks, no obligations, other than to be revered as a youthful bride, tragically lost to illness”.

A Sad Conclusion and Deeper Themes

When they eventually succumb to their desires, the sex is sad, without much play or complicity. It isn’t the sepia-toned romance she fantasized about for a full decade. Cora puts on an alluring gown and Sam “performs oral sex with grim determination within their rented space” prior to a meal. One imagines that Cora wants to slip inside a certain type of literary world, where intimacy is messy and ambiguous, where imbalances of control exist, and everyone misbehaves, and no one tallies the cost.

Somers consistently suggests the root of Cora’s problem: she has such cutting wit, but so little joy. Regarding an intimate picture from Sam, Cora critiques, “he has clenched his abs and made sure he was hard, but has not cleared the frame of Crocs”. Since the event that killed their fun was having children, readers may fret about what these idiots are doing to their children. When Cora’s daughter asks about sex, the adults fumble. They begin with procreation then concede that sex serves other purposes. Eliot mentions a penis then concedes that one isn’t required. Ultimately, he settles for, “you're aware of private parts?”

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 ideas are more directly explored in Cora's internal dialogues. Reading these exchanges, one wonders what lesson Cora and her cynical lot would take from their unsatisfying escapades. Would Cora grow more receptive of life’s imperfect joys, its sentimental delights? Upon being questioned by Eliot about her affair during an audio program on bondage, Cora reflects “every serious exchange is undermined by its particulars”. Some might say enhanced. Yet that is not her nature, and the author refuses to grant the protagonist easy revelations, or stretch her where she is unable to go.

A Final Appraisal

The result is a razor-sharp, uproariously funny, finely observed novel, written with devastating precision. 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. For the sake of argument, we'll assume so.