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Within Erin Somers’s The Ten Year Affair, we meet Cora, a woman in her prime who yearns for a type of romance from another era with a man of a different time. Sadly, for Cora, morality in 2015 is rigid and cynical, and instead of having the affair, Cora spends 10 years overthinking it, daydreaming of it and discussing it with her potential lover, Sam – a playgroup dad who works as “head narrative architect” at a mortgage start-up. This novel presents itself as a humorous twist on the classic adultery novel and a send-up of a narrow, self-conscious group 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 managed to ruin even sex.

Depicting 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 “exhausting constant demands” of parenthood, they have desk jobs, a pair of kids, and an ongoing fungal issue growing under their bathroom tiles that they lack the energy and money to sort out. They spend time with similarly minded urban exiles who have escaped the metropolis to sip craft cocktails from rustic glassware and judge each other amidst a more rural setting. Yet Cora's isolation here, it’s not because her own critical, joyless perspective but because her new neighbours are “boring and self-absorbed, duller and vainer than they were back in the city”.

Eliot is high-minded and oblivious. He snacks casually as she scrubs the oven 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 searches for chanterelles. She deeply desires drama, some moral abandon, a partner who will beg, and adore, and “express raw admiration for her prowess”.

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

The Problem of High-Minded 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 says, but in truth, about all aspects of life). What she feels for Sam are “bland, liking-adjacent”. She wants “to get fucked into the astral plane and escape her own reality momentarily”. Yet, for a decade, Sam demurs while Cora pines. She constructs an alternate timeline running concurrent to her actual existence, where in place of chores and errands, she has sex and hotels and Sam. When her fictional romance fizzles, her mind conjures “a French guy named Baptiste” who joins Sam in helping her out of the bath, “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 Undercurrents

When they eventually succumb to temptation, their intimacy is melancholy, lacking in fun or mutual connection. It fails to be the nostalgically perfect affair she dreamed up for 10 years. Cora dons a slinky dress and Sam “performs oral sex with grim determination in their hotel room” before dinner. The reader senses 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 no one tallies the cost.

Throughout the novel the core issue for Cora: she possesses a sharp tongue, but so little joy. Regarding an intimate picture from Sam, Cora complains, “he tightened his stomach and ensured he was aroused, but failed to remove his casual footwear from the shot”. Given that the catalyst that killed their fun was parenthood, one worries about what these idiots are doing to their children. When Cora’s daughter asks about sex, the parents stumble. They begin with procreation then concede that sex serves other purposes. The father references male anatomy then admits it is not essential. Ultimately, he settles for, “you're aware of private parts?”

Underpinning the narrative runs the subtle undercurrent of common existential queries of midlife: do our lives have meaning? Where do we go after death? These ideas are more directly explored in Cora’s imagined conversations. Reading these exchanges, one wonders what lesson Cora and her jaded circle would take from their unsatisfying escapades. Might Cora become more open to life’s imperfect joys, its corny pleasures? Upon being questioned by Eliot about her affair in the middle of a podcast about rope, 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 Assessment

This is an incisive, uproariously funny, finely observed novel, written with such withering exactitude. It is profoundly self-aware, economical yet rich with implication: a portrait of an anxious, loin-girding generation entering midlife, chronically embarrassed, at once afraid of and desperate for sensation. Or maybe that’s just the New Yorkers. Let’s say it is.