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In Erin Somers’s The Ten Year Affair, the story centers on Cora, a woman in her prime who craves a type of romance from another era from a man of a different time. Sadly, for Cora, the modern ethical landscape is rigid and cynical, so rather than embarking on the affair, Cora devotes a full decade overthinking it, fantasising about it and talking it over with her potential lover, Sam – a playgroup dad who works as “head narrative architect” at a mortgage start-up. This novel positions itself as a comic take on the traditional tale of infidelity and a send-up of a particular, self-aware clique of economically slipping New Yorkers. It stands as the definitive narrative of middle-aged unfaithfulness our entire generation deserves: a propulsive, witty takedown of unbearably anxious individuals who’ve managed to ruin even sex.

A Portrait of Self-Satisfied Unhappiness

The central couple, Cora and Eliot are highly educated, somewhat arrogant former city dwellers who, as costs increased and their family expanded, have relocated with hesitation to the suburbs. Trapped by the “gruelling all-the-time-ness” of raising children, they juggle desk jobs, a pair of kids, and a persistent mushroom proliferating beneath their bathroom tiles that they lack the energy and money to sort out. Their social circle similarly minded urban exiles who have escaped the metropolis to drink negronis from rustic glassware and critique one another amidst a more rural setting. Yet Cora's isolation in this new environment, it’s not because her fussy, lifeless lens but because her new neighbours are “boring and self-absorbed, even more so than in their previous urban life”.

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, doing laundry by hand while he searches for chanterelles. She longs for drama, a bit of depravity, a partner who will beg, and adore, and “express raw admiration for her prowess”.

"The shabbiness of real life, 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 incapable of that kind of abandon herself. She finds it "an overwhelming request to feel fervor" (about work, she claims, but in truth, about all aspects of life). Her feelings for Sam are “bland, liking-adjacent”. She wants “to get fucked into the astral plane and not think about her life for a second”. But, for years, Sam demurs while Cora pines. She imagines an alternate timeline running concurrent to her actual existence, where in place of chores and errands, she has passion, luxury, and her imagined lover. As this fantasy dims, her mind conjures “a Gallic character called Baptiste” who joins Sam in assisting her from the tub, “leaving her with no duties, no tasks, no requirements, except to be worshipped as a youthful bride, tragically lost to illness”.

A Disappointing Climax and Deeper Themes

When they finally do give in to their desires, the sex is sad, lacking in fun or mutual connection. It fails to be the nostalgically perfect affair she dreamed up for 10 years. Cora puts on a slinky dress and Sam “stoically eat[s] her out in their hotel room” prior to a meal. The reader senses that Cora wants to inhabit a James Salter novel, where sex is sordid and confusing, where the power dynamics are unequal, and characters act out, and no one tallies the cost.

Throughout the novel the core issue for Cora: 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 failed to remove his casual footwear from the shot”. Since the event that diminished their pleasure was having children, one worries about what these idiots are doing to their children. As her daughter inquires about sex, the parents stumble. They start with babies then acknowledge that sex serves other purposes. Eliot mentions a penis then admits it is not essential. Ultimately, he settles for, “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 explicit in Cora's internal dialogues. Considering these passages, the reader may ponder what lesson Cora and her cynical lot would take from their disappointing dramas. Would Cora grow more receptive of life’s imperfect joys, its corny pleasures? 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. But that’s not Cora, and the author refuses to grant her character false epiphanies, or force growth beyond her capacity.

A Final Appraisal

This is a razor-sharp, uproariously funny, exquisitely detailed novel, written with devastating precision. It is absolutely aware of itself, economical yet rich with implication: a depiction of an anxious, loin-girding generation in middle age, perpetually self-conscious, simultaneously terrified of and hungry for intense experience. Or maybe that’s just the New Yorkers. For the sake of argument, we'll assume so.