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In the novel by Erin Somers 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, the modern ethical landscape is rigid and cynical, and instead of having the affair, Cora spends 10 years overthinking it, daydreaming of it and talking it over with her potential lover, Sam – a playgroup dad who works as “chief storytelling officer” at a fintech company. This novel positions itself as a comic take on the classic adultery novel and a sharp satire of a particular, self-aware clique of economically slipping New Yorkers. One could call it the definitive narrative of middle-aged unfaithfulness our entire generation deserves: an energetic, clever critique of insufferable hand-wringers who’ve somehow spoiled even sex.

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 upstate. Caught in the “gruelling all-the-time-ness” of parenthood, they have desk jobs, a pair of kids, and an ongoing fungal issue growing under their bathroom tiles which they cannot afford or muster the will to fix. Their social circle similarly minded urban exiles 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’s not because her own critical, joyless perspective but because her suburban peers are “dull and vain, even more so than in their previous urban life”.

Eliot is intellectually lofty and utterly unaware. He eats popcorn while she cleans vigorously and states he has no desire to own her. Cora imagines herself trying to survive a rustic life together, washing clothes on a stone while he forages for mushrooms. She longs for drama, a bit of depravity, a lover who will plead, and worship, and “growl at the feet of the woman’s excellence”.

"The mundane grind of everyday existence, 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 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 wants “to get fucked into the astral plane and not think about her life for a second”. Yet, for a decade, Sam refuses while Cora pines. She imagines an alternate timeline alongside her real life, where instead of bills and school pickups, she has sex and hotels and Sam. As this fantasy dims, she imagines “a French guy named Baptiste” who joins Sam in assisting her from the tub, “leaving her with no duties, no responsibilities, 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 temptation, the sex is sad, without much play or complicity. It fails to be the sepia-toned romance she fantasized about for 10 years. Cora puts on a slinky dress and Sam “stoically eat[s] her out in their hotel room” before dinner. The reader senses that Cora desires to inhabit 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.

Throughout the novel the root of Cora’s problem: she possesses a sharp tongue, but so little joy. Regarding an intimate picture from Sam, Cora complains, “he tightened his stomach 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 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. 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 familiar middle-age questions: do our lives have meaning? What follows our final breath? These ideas are more explicit in Cora's internal dialogues. Considering these passages, one wonders what lesson Cora and her jaded circle would derive from their disappointing dramas. Would Cora grow more open to life’s flawed pleasures, its sentimental delights? When Eliot asks about her affair during an audio program on bondage, Cora reflects “every serious exchange is compromised by specific context”. Others could argue it's enriched. But that’s not Cora, and Somers doesn’t give the protagonist easy revelations, or force growth beyond her capacity.

An Ultimate Appraisal

This is a razor-sharp, uproariously funny, finely observed novel, written with devastating precision. It is absolutely aware of itself, spare and brimming with subtext: a depiction of an anxious, loin-girding generation in middle age, chronically embarrassed, simultaneously terrified of and hungry for intense experience. Perhaps this is solely a metropolitan trait. For the sake of argument, we'll assume so.