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Within Erin Somers’s The Ten Year Affair, we meet a millennial mother named Cora, a woman in her prime who craves a bygone kind of passion from a bygone kind of man. 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, daydreaming of it and talking it over with the object of her desire, Sam – a father from her child's circle who works as “head narrative architect” at a mortgage start-up. The book positions itself as a comic take on the traditional tale of infidelity and a sharp satire of a narrow, self-conscious group of economically slipping New Yorkers. It stands as the definitive narrative of middle-aged unfaithfulness this current cohort deserves: an energetic, clever critique of unbearably anxious individuals who’ve managed to ruin intimacy itself.

A Portrait of Smug 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. Trapped by the “exhausting constant demands” of raising children, they have office careers, two children, and a persistent mushroom proliferating beneath their bathroom tiles which they cannot afford or muster the will to fix. They spend time with similarly minded urban exiles who have escaped the metropolis to drink negronis from rustic glassware and judge each other closer to nature. 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, duller and vainer than they were back in the city”.

Her husband Eliot remains high-minded and oblivious. He snacks casually while she cleans vigorously and states he has no desire to own 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 Over-Intellectualized Desire

The central conflict is that she’s as high-minded and rigid as Eliot, and unable to surrender to primal passion. She finds it "an overwhelming request to feel fervor" (regarding her career, she says, but in truth, about all aspects of life). What she feels 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”. But, for years, Sam refuses 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. As this fantasy dims, her mind conjures “a Gallic character called Baptiste” who joins 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 Disappointing Conclusion and Deeper Themes

When they finally do give in to temptation, their intimacy is melancholy, without much play or complicity. It isn’t the sepia-toned romance she dreamed up for a full decade. Cora puts on an alluring gown and Sam “stoically eat[s] her out in their hotel room” before dinner. The reader senses that Cora wants to slip inside a James Salter novel, where intimacy is messy and ambiguous, where imbalances of control exist, and characters act out, and nobody keeps score.

Somers consistently suggests the root of Cora’s problem: she has such cutting wit, but so little joy. Of Sam’s erotic photo, Cora critiques, “he has clenched his abs and ensured he was aroused, but failed to remove his casual footwear from the shot”. Given that the catalyst that diminished their pleasure was parenthood, one worries about the impact these flawed adults have on their kids. As her daughter inquires about sex, the parents stumble. They begin with procreation then acknowledge that sex isn’t always about babies. The father references male anatomy then concedes that one isn’t required. Ultimately, he settles for, “you know genitals?”

Underpinning the narrative runs the subtle undercurrent of familiar middle-age questions: do our lives have meaning? What follows our final breath? These ideas are more directly explored in Cora's internal dialogues. Considering these passages, the reader may ponder what moral Cora and her cynical lot would derive from their disappointing dramas. Would Cora grow more receptive of life’s imperfect joys, its sentimental delights? When Eliot asks about her affair in the middle of a podcast about rope, Cora reflects “every serious exchange is undermined by its particulars”. Others could argue it's enriched. But that’s not Cora, and the author refuses to grant her character false epiphanies, or force growth beyond her capacity.

An Ultimate Appraisal

This is an incisive, uproariously funny, exquisitely detailed novel, written with devastating precision. It is profoundly self-aware, spare and brimming with subtext: a depiction of a worried, self-protective cohort entering midlife, 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.