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Within Erin Somers’s The Ten Year Affair, the story centers on a millennial mother named Cora, a woman in her prime 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 obsessively analyzing it, fantasising about it and discussing it with her potential lover, Sam – a playgroup dad who holds the title “head narrative architect” at a fintech company. This novel presents itself as a humorous twist on the classic adultery novel and a send-up of a narrow, self-conscious group of downwardly mobile New Yorkers. It stands as the definitive narrative of middle-aged unfaithfulness our entire generation has coming: an energetic, clever critique of unbearably anxious individuals who’ve somehow spoiled even sex.

A Portrait of Self-Satisfied Discontent

Cora and her husband 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 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 escaped the metropolis to drink negronis out of mason jars and critique one another amidst a more rural setting. Yet Cora's isolation here, it stems not from her own critical, joyless perspective 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 eats popcorn while she cleans vigorously and states he has no desire to own her. Cora imagines herself trying to survive with Eliot in the woods, washing clothes on a stone while he searches for chanterelles. She longs for drama, a bit of depravity, a lover who will plead, and adore, and “express raw admiration for her prowess”.

"The shabbiness of real life, one must acknowledge its relentless predictability."

The Problem of High-Minded Longing

The central conflict is that she’s as high-minded and rigid as Eliot, and incapable of that kind of abandon herself. It’s “too much to ask her to be passionate” (about work, she says, but really about everything). What she feels for Sam are “tepid, barely beyond simple fondness”. She craves “a transcendent physical experience and escape her own reality momentarily”. Yet, for a decade, Sam demurs while Cora pines. She constructs an alternate timeline alongside her real life, where in place of chores and errands, she has passion, luxury, and her imagined lover. When her fictional romance fizzles, she imagines “a Gallic character called Baptiste” who teams up with Sam in assisting her from the tub, “nothing for her to do, no tasks, no obligations, except to be worshipped like someone’s teenage wife, tragically lost to illness”.

A Sad Climax and Deeper Themes

When they finally do give in to their desires, their intimacy is melancholy, lacking in fun or mutual connection. It fails to be the nostalgically perfect affair she fantasized about for 10 years. Cora dons an alluring gown and Sam “stoically eat[s] her out within their rented space” before dinner. One imagines that Cora desires to slip inside a certain type of literary world, where sex is sordid and confusing, where the power dynamics are unequal, and everyone misbehaves, and nobody keeps score.

Throughout the novel the root of Cora’s problem: she has such cutting wit, but so little joy. Of Sam’s erotic photo, Cora complains, “he tightened his stomach and made sure he was hard, but has not cleared the frame of Crocs”. Since the event that killed their fun was parenthood, one worries 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?”

Beneath the story flows a quiet theme of common existential queries of midlife: do our lives have meaning? What follows our final breath? These ideas are more directly explored in Cora’s imagined conversations. Reading these exchanges, one wonders what lesson Cora and her jaded circle would derive from their unsatisfying escapades. Would Cora grow more open to life’s imperfect joys, its sentimental delights? Upon being questioned by Eliot about her affair during an audio program on bondage, Cora thinks “every serious exchange is undermined by its particulars”. 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 Appraisal

The result is a razor-sharp, uproariously funny, exquisitely detailed novel, written with such withering exactitude. It is profoundly self-aware, spare and brimming with subtext: a portrait of a worried, self-protective cohort entering midlife, perpetually self-conscious, simultaneously terrified of and hungry for intense experience. Perhaps this is solely a metropolitan trait. For the sake of argument, we'll assume so.