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In Erin Somers’s The Ten Year Affair, we meet a millennial mother named Cora, a millennial mother who desperately wants a type of romance from another era from a bygone kind of man. Sadly, for Cora, morality in 2015 is rigid and cynical, so rather than embarking on 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 holds the title “chief storytelling officer” at a fintech company. This novel positions itself as a humorous twist on the classic adultery novel and a sharp satire of a particular, self-aware clique of downwardly mobile New Yorkers. One could call it the definitive narrative of middle-aged unfaithfulness this current cohort has coming: a propulsive, witty takedown of unbearably anxious individuals who’ve managed to ruin even sex.

Depicting Self-Satisfied Unhappiness

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 upstate. Caught in the “exhausting constant demands” of parenthood, they juggle office careers, two children, and a persistent mushroom proliferating beneath their bathroom tiles that they lack the energy and money to sort out. They spend time with similarly minded urban exiles who have fled the city to sip craft cocktails from rustic glassware and judge each other amidst a more rural setting. But if Cora is lonely in this new environment, it stems not from her fussy, lifeless lens but because her new neighbours are “dull and vain, even more so than in their previous urban life”.

Eliot is high-minded and oblivious. He eats popcorn while she cleans vigorously and says he doesn’t wish to possess her. In her mind, Cora pictures them attempting to endure a rustic life together, doing laundry by hand while he forages for mushrooms. She deeply desires excitement, a bit of depravity, a partner who will beg, and worship, and “express raw admiration for her prowess”.

"The mundane grind of everyday existence, you had to admire its consistency."

The Trouble with Over-Intellectualized Longing

The central conflict 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" (about work, she claims, but really about everything). What she feels 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”. But, for years, Sam demurs while Cora languishes. She constructs a parallel reality running concurrent to her actual existence, where in place of chores and errands, she has sex and hotels and Sam. As this fantasy dims, she imagines “a Gallic character called Baptiste” who teams up with Sam in helping her out of the bath, “nothing for her to do, no responsibilities, no obligations, except to be worshipped like someone’s teenage wife, tragically lost to illness”.

A Disappointing Climax and Deeper Themes

When they eventually succumb to their desires, their intimacy is melancholy, without much play or complicity. It fails to be the sepia-toned romance she fantasized about for a full decade. Cora dons a slinky dress and Sam “stoically eat[s] her out in their hotel room” prior to a meal. The reader senses that Cora desires to slip inside a James Salter novel, where sex is sordid and confusing, where imbalances of control exist, and everyone misbehaves, and no one tallies the cost.

Throughout the novel the core issue for Cora: she possesses a sharp tongue, but a profound lack of happiness. 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 killed their fun was having children, 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 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? Where do we go after death? These themes are more explicit in Cora's internal dialogues. Reading these exchanges, the reader may ponder what lesson Cora and her cynical lot would derive from their disappointing dramas. Might Cora become more open to life’s imperfect joys, its sentimental delights? When Eliot asks about her affair in the middle of a podcast about rope, Cora reflects “all meaningful communication is undermined by its particulars”. 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.

An Ultimate Assessment

The result is an incisive, uproariously funny, exquisitely detailed novel, written with such withering exactitude. It is profoundly self-aware, spare and brimming with subtext: a depiction of an anxious, loin-girding generation entering midlife, perpetually self-conscious, simultaneously terrified of and hungry for intense experience. Or maybe that’s just the New Yorkers. Let’s say it is.