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In the novel by Erin Somers The Ten Year Affair, we meet a millennial mother named Cora, a millennial mother who desperately wants a type of romance from another era with a man of a different time. Unfortunately for her, morality in 2015 is rigid and cynical, and instead of having the affair, Cora devotes a full decade obsessively analyzing it, fantasising about it and talking it over with her potential lover, Sam – a father from her child's circle who works as “chief storytelling officer” at a mortgage start-up. The book presents itself as a humorous twist on the classic adultery novel and a sharp satire of a narrow, self-conscious group of downwardly mobile New Yorkers. One could call it the definitive narrative of middle-aged unfaithfulness this current cohort has coming: a propulsive, witty takedown of insufferable hand-wringers who’ve somehow spoiled intimacy itself.

A Portrait of Smug Discontent

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 upstate. Trapped by the “exhausting constant demands” of parenthood, they juggle office careers, a pair of kids, 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 out of mason jars 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 while she cleans vigorously and states he has no desire to own her. Cora imagines herself trying to survive with Eliot in the woods, washing clothes on a stone while he forages for mushrooms. She deeply desires drama, some moral abandon, a partner who will beg, and worship, and “growl at the feet of the woman’s excellence”.

"The shabbiness of real life, one must acknowledge its relentless predictability."

The Trouble with High-Minded 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" (regarding her career, she says, but in truth, about all aspects of life). What she feels for Sam are “bland, liking-adjacent”. She craves “to get fucked into the astral plane and not think about her life for a second”. Yet, for a decade, Sam demurs while Cora languishes. She constructs a parallel reality 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 teams up with Sam in assisting her from the tub, “nothing for her to do, no tasks, no obligations, other than to be revered like someone’s teenage wife, tragically lost to illness”.

A Disappointing Climax and Deeper Themes

When they eventually succumb to their desires, their intimacy is melancholy, without much play or complicity. It fails to be the nostalgically perfect affair she dreamed up for a full decade. Cora puts on a slinky dress and Sam “stoically eat[s] her out within their rented space” 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 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 critiques, “he tightened his stomach and ensured he was aroused, but has not cleared the frame of Crocs”. Since the event that diminished their pleasure 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 start with babies then acknowledge that sex isn’t always about babies. Eliot mentions a penis then admits it is not essential. Ultimately, he settles for, “you know genitals?”

Beneath the story flows a quiet theme of familiar middle-age questions: do our lives have meaning? What follows our final breath? These ideas are more explicit in Cora’s imagined conversations. Considering these passages, the reader may ponder what moral Cora and her jaded circle would derive from their unsatisfying escapades. Might Cora become more receptive of life’s flawed pleasures, its sentimental delights? When Eliot asks 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 the author refuses to grant her character false epiphanies, or stretch her where she is unable to go.

A Final Assessment

This is a razor-sharp, uproariously funny, finely observed novel, crafted with such withering exactitude. It is profoundly self-aware, spare and brimming with subtext: a depiction 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. For the sake of argument, we'll assume so.