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In the novel by Erin Somers The Ten Year Affair, the story centers on a millennial mother named Cora, a millennial mother who craves a type of romance from another era from a bygone kind of man. Unfortunately for her, the modern ethical landscape is rigid and cynical, so rather than embarking on the affair, Cora spends 10 years obsessively analyzing it, fantasising about it and talking it over with the object of her desire, Sam – a father from her child's circle who holds the title “chief storytelling officer” at a fintech company. This novel presents itself as a comic take on the traditional tale of infidelity and a send-up of a particular, self-aware clique of economically slipping New Yorkers. One could call it the definitive narrative of middle-aged unfaithfulness this current cohort deserves: a propulsive, witty takedown of unbearably anxious individuals who’ve managed to ruin intimacy itself.

A Portrait of Smug Unhappiness

The central couple, Cora and Eliot are highly educated, somewhat arrogant former city dwellers who, as costs increased and their family expanded, have moved reluctantly to the suburbs. Trapped by the “gruelling all-the-time-ness” 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. Their social circle other smug, overeducated Brooklynites who have fled the city to sip craft cocktails out of mason jars and judge each other closer to nature. But if Cora is lonely in this new environment, it stems not from her fussy, lifeless lens but because her suburban peers are “boring and self-absorbed, even more so than in their previous urban life”.

Eliot is intellectually lofty and utterly unaware. He snacks casually as she scrubs the oven and states he has no desire to own her. Cora imagines them attempting to endure a rustic life together, doing laundry by hand while he forages for mushrooms. She longs for excitement, a bit of depravity, a partner 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 Longing

The trouble is that Cora is just as intellectually constrained as her husband, and incapable of that kind of abandon herself. It’s “too much to ask her to be passionate” (about work, she claims, but in truth, about all aspects of life). Her feelings for Sam are “tepid, barely beyond simple fondness”. She craves “a transcendent physical experience and escape her own reality momentarily”. But, for years, Sam refuses while Cora pines. She constructs a parallel reality running concurrent to her actual existence, where instead of bills and school pickups, she has passion, luxury, and her imagined lover. When her fictional romance fizzles, she imagines “a French guy named Baptiste” who teams up with Sam in helping her out of the bath, “leaving her with no duties, no responsibilities, no obligations, other than to be revered as a youthful bride, tragically lost to illness”.

A Sad Conclusion and Undercurrents

When they eventually succumb to their desires, their intimacy is melancholy, lacking in fun or mutual connection. It isn’t the nostalgically perfect affair she dreamed up for a full decade. Cora puts on a slinky dress and Sam “stoically eat[s] her out in their hotel room” prior to a meal. The reader senses 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 nobody keeps score.

Somers consistently suggests the root of Cora’s problem: she possesses a sharp tongue, but a profound lack of happiness. Of Sam’s erotic photo, Cora critiques, “he tightened his stomach and ensured he was aroused, but failed to remove his casual footwear from the shot”. Since the event that diminished their pleasure was having children, readers may fret about the impact these flawed adults have on their kids. As her daughter inquires about sex, the adults fumble. They begin with procreation then acknowledge that sex isn’t always about babies. Eliot mentions a penis 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 familiar middle-age questions: do our lives have meaning? What follows our final breath? These themes are more directly explored in Cora's internal dialogues. Reading these exchanges, one wonders what lesson Cora and her jaded circle would derive from their unsatisfying escapades. Might Cora become more receptive of life’s flawed pleasures, its sentimental delights? When Eliot asks about her affair during an audio program on bondage, Cora thinks “every serious exchange is compromised by specific context”. Some might say enhanced. But that’s not Cora, and Somers doesn’t give the protagonist easy revelations, or force growth beyond her capacity.

An Ultimate Assessment

This is a razor-sharp, uproariously funny, finely observed novel, crafted with such withering exactitude. It is absolutely aware of itself, spare and brimming with subtext: a portrait of a worried, self-protective cohort in middle age, chronically embarrassed, simultaneously terrified of and hungry for intense experience. Perhaps this is solely a metropolitan trait. Let’s say it is.