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Within Erin Somers’s The Ten Year Affair, we meet a millennial mother named Cora, a millennial mother who craves a bygone kind of passion with a man of a different time. Sadly, for Cora, morality in 2015 is inflexible and jaded, so rather than embarking on the affair, Cora spends a full decade overthinking it, fantasising about it and talking it over with her potential lover, Sam – a father from her child's circle who works as “head narrative architect” at a mortgage start-up. The book presents itself as a comic take on the traditional tale of infidelity and a sharp satire of a narrow, self-conscious group of downwardly mobile New Yorkers. It stands as the midlife adultery story this current cohort has coming: a propulsive, witty takedown of insufferable hand-wringers who’ve somehow spoiled even sex.

Depicting Self-Satisfied Unhappiness

Cora and her husband Eliot are smug, overeducated Brooklynites who, as costs increased and their family expanded, have moved reluctantly upstate. Caught in the “exhausting constant demands” of raising children, they have office careers, a pair of kids, and an ongoing fungal issue proliferating beneath 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 amidst a more rural setting. But if Cora is lonely in this new environment, it stems not from her own critical, joyless perspective but because her suburban peers are “boring and self-absorbed, duller and vainer than they were back in the city”.

Eliot is intellectually lofty and utterly unaware. He snacks casually while she cleans vigorously and says he doesn’t wish to possess her. Cora imagines 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 plead, and worship, and “express raw admiration for her prowess”.

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

The Problem of Over-Intellectualized Desire

The trouble is that she’s as high-minded and rigid as Eliot, and unable to surrender to primal passion. It’s “too much to ask her to be passionate” (regarding her career, she says, but in truth, about all aspects of life). Her feelings for Sam are “bland, liking-adjacent”. She wants “a transcendent physical experience and escape her own reality momentarily”. But, for years, Sam demurs while Cora languishes. She imagines a parallel reality running concurrent to her actual existence, where instead of bills and school pickups, she has passion, luxury, and her imagined lover. As this fantasy dims, she imagines “a Gallic character called Baptiste” who joins Sam in assisting her from the tub, “nothing for her to do, no tasks, no obligations, other than to be revered as a youthful bride, who’d died improbably of TB”.

A Disappointing Climax and Deeper Themes

When they finally do give in to temptation, the sex is sad, lacking in fun or mutual connection. It fails to be the nostalgically perfect affair she dreamed up 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 the power dynamics are unequal, and everyone misbehaves, and no one tallies the cost.

Throughout the novel the root of Cora’s problem: she has such cutting wit, but a profound lack of happiness. Of Sam’s erotic photo, Cora critiques, “he tightened his stomach and made sure he was hard, but failed to remove his casual footwear from the shot”. Since the event that killed their fun was parenthood, readers may fret about what these idiots are doing to their children. When Cora’s daughter asks about sex, the parents stumble. They start with babies then acknowledge that sex serves other purposes. The father references male anatomy then concedes that one isn’t required. 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 ideas are more explicit in Cora's internal dialogues. Reading these exchanges, the reader may ponder what moral Cora and her cynical lot would take from their disappointing dramas. Might Cora become more open to life’s flawed pleasures, its corny pleasures? When Eliot asks about her affair in the middle of a podcast about rope, Cora thinks “every serious exchange is undermined by its particulars”. Others could argue it's enriched. 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, crafted 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, perpetually self-conscious, at once afraid of and desperate for sensation. Or maybe that’s just the New Yorkers. Let’s say it is.