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In the novel by Erin Somers The Ten Year Affair, the story centers on a millennial mother named Cora, a millennial mother who yearns for a bygone kind of passion from a bygone kind of man. Unfortunately for her, morality in 2015 is inflexible and jaded, so rather than embarking on the affair, Cora devotes 10 years obsessively analyzing it, daydreaming of it and discussing it with her potential lover, Sam – a playgroup dad who works as “head narrative architect” at a fintech company. This novel positions 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. One could call it the midlife adultery story this current cohort deserves: a propulsive, witty takedown of insufferable hand-wringers who’ve managed to ruin intimacy itself.

A Portrait of Self-Satisfied Discontent

The central couple, Cora and Eliot are smug, overeducated Brooklynites who, as costs increased and their family expanded, have moved reluctantly upstate. Trapped by the “gruelling all-the-time-ness” of raising children, they have office careers, two children, 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 from rustic glassware and judge each other amidst a more rural setting. Yet Cora's isolation in this new environment, 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”.

Eliot is intellectually lofty and utterly unaware. He eats popcorn as she scrubs the oven and states he has no desire to own her. In her mind, Cora pictures 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 partner 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 Desire

The trouble 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 says, but really about everything). What she feels for Sam are “bland, liking-adjacent”. She craves “a transcendent physical experience and not think about her life for a second”. Yet, for a decade, Sam refuses 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. As this fantasy dims, she imagines “a Gallic character called Baptiste” who teams up with Sam in helping her out of the bath, “leaving her with no duties, no responsibilities, no requirements, other than to be revered like someone’s teenage wife, tragically lost to illness”.

A Sad Conclusion and Undercurrents

When they finally do give in to their desires, the sex is sad, without much play or complicity. It fails to be the sepia-toned romance she fantasized about for a full decade. Cora dons a slinky dress and Sam “performs oral sex with grim determination in their hotel room” before dinner. One imagines that Cora wants to inhabit a certain type of literary world, where intimacy is messy and ambiguous, where the power dynamics are unequal, and characters act out, 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 ensured he was aroused, but failed to remove his casual footwear from the shot”. Given that the catalyst that killed their fun was parenthood, 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 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're aware of private parts?”

Beneath the story runs the subtle undercurrent of familiar middle-age questions: is there purpose to our existence? Where do we go after death? These ideas are more explicit in Cora’s imagined conversations. Reading these exchanges, one wonders what moral Cora and her cynical lot would derive from their disappointing dramas. Might Cora become more receptive of life’s imperfect joys, its sentimental delights? Upon being questioned by Eliot about her affair in the middle of a podcast about rope, Cora reflects “every serious exchange is compromised by specific context”. Others could argue it's enriched. But that’s not Cora, and the author refuses to grant the protagonist easy revelations, or stretch her where she is unable to go.

An Ultimate Assessment

This is an incisive, uproariously funny, finely observed novel, crafted with such withering exactitude. It is profoundly self-aware, spare and brimming with subtext: a portrait of a worried, self-protective cohort in middle age, 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.