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In Erin Somers’s The Ten Year Affair, we meet Cora, a woman in her prime who desperately wants a type of romance from another era with a bygone kind of man. Sadly, for Cora, the modern ethical landscape is rigid and cynical, so rather than embarking on the affair, Cora devotes a full decade obsessively analyzing it, fantasising about it and talking it over with the object of her desire, Sam – a father from her child's circle who holds the title “chief storytelling officer” at a mortgage start-up. The book 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: a propulsive, witty takedown of unbearably anxious individuals who’ve somehow spoiled even sex.

Depicting Self-Satisfied Unhappiness

Cora and her husband Eliot are smug, overeducated Brooklynites who, as costs increased and their family expanded, have moved reluctantly to the suburbs. Trapped by the “exhausting constant demands” of raising children, they juggle desk jobs, a pair of kids, and an ongoing fungal issue 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 fled the city to sip craft cocktails from rustic glassware and critique one another closer to nature. Yet Cora's isolation here, it stems not from her fussy, lifeless lens but because her suburban peers are “boring and self-absorbed, even more so than in their previous urban life”.

Her husband Eliot remains intellectually lofty and utterly unaware. He snacks casually as she scrubs the oven and says he doesn’t wish to possess her. Cora imagines herself trying to survive with Eliot in the woods, doing laundry by hand while he searches for chanterelles. She deeply desires excitement, a bit of depravity, a lover who will plead, and worship, 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 unable to surrender to primal passion. It’s “too much to ask her to be passionate” (about work, she claims, but really about everything). Her feelings for Sam are “bland, liking-adjacent”. She wants “a transcendent physical experience and not think about her life for a second”. Yet, for a decade, Sam refuses while Cora pines. She imagines an alternate timeline alongside her real life, where in place of chores and errands, she has passion, luxury, and her imagined lover. As this fantasy dims, she imagines “a Gallic character called Baptiste” who joins Sam in helping her out of the bath, “leaving her with no duties, no responsibilities, no requirements, other than to be revered as a youthful bride, who’d died improbably of TB”.

A Sad Climax and Deeper Themes

When they finally do give in to temptation, their intimacy is melancholy, lacking in fun or mutual connection. It fails to be the sepia-toned romance she fantasized about for a full decade. Cora dons an alluring gown 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 nobody keeps score.

Somers consistently suggests the root of Cora’s problem: she has such cutting wit, but a profound lack of happiness. Of Sam’s erotic photo, Cora complains, “he has clenched his abs and ensured he was aroused, but has not cleared the frame of Crocs”. Since the event that diminished their pleasure was having children, readers may fret about the impact these flawed adults have on their kids. As her daughter inquires about sex, the parents stumble. They begin with procreation then concede 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?”

Underpinning the narrative runs the subtle undercurrent of familiar middle-age questions: do our lives have meaning? Where do we go after death? These themes are more directly explored in Cora's internal dialogues. Considering these passages, the reader may ponder what moral Cora and her jaded circle would derive 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 during an audio program on bondage, Cora reflects “every serious exchange is compromised by specific context”. Others could argue it's enriched. Yet that is not her nature, and the author refuses to grant the protagonist easy revelations, 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 profoundly self-aware, economical yet rich with implication: a depiction 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.