🔗 Share this article

In the novel by Erin Somers The Ten Year Affair, we meet a millennial mother named Cora, a woman in her prime who craves a type of romance from another era with a man of a different time. Unfortunately for her, morality in 2015 is inflexible and jaded, and instead of having the affair, Cora spends a full decade overthinking it, fantasising about it and discussing it with the object of her desire, Sam – a playgroup dad who works as “chief storytelling officer” at a fintech company. This novel presents itself as a humorous twist on the classic adultery novel and a sharp satire of a particular, self-aware clique of downwardly mobile New Yorkers. One could call it the definitive narrative of middle-aged unfaithfulness our entire generation has coming: a propulsive, witty takedown of unbearably anxious individuals who’ve somehow spoiled even sex.

A Portrait of Self-Satisfied Discontent

The central couple, Cora and Eliot are highly educated, somewhat arrogant former city dwellers who, with rents rising and children growing, have moved reluctantly to the suburbs. Caught in 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. Their social circle other smug, overeducated Brooklynites who have escaped the metropolis to drink negronis out of mason jars and judge each other amidst a more rural setting. But if Cora is lonely here, it’s not because her own critical, joyless perspective but because her suburban peers are “boring and self-absorbed, even more so than in their previous urban life”.

Her husband Eliot remains high-minded and oblivious. He snacks casually while she cleans vigorously and says he doesn’t wish to possess her. In her mind, Cora pictures herself trying to survive a rustic life together, washing clothes on a stone while he forages for mushrooms. She longs for drama, a bit of depravity, a lover who will beg, and adore, and “express raw admiration for her prowess”.

"The mundane grind of everyday existence, 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. 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 craves “a transcendent physical experience and not think about her life for a second”. But, for years, Sam refuses while Cora pines. She imagines a parallel reality running concurrent to her actual existence, where instead of bills and school pickups, she has passion, luxury, and her imagined lover. When her fictional romance fizzles, she imagines “a Gallic character called Baptiste” who teams up with Sam in helping her out of the bath, “nothing for her to do, no responsibilities, no requirements, except to be worshipped as a youthful bride, tragically lost to illness”.

A Sad Conclusion and Deeper Themes

When they eventually succumb 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. One imagines that Cora wants to slip inside a James Salter novel, where intimacy is messy and ambiguous, 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 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”. Since the event that diminished their pleasure was parenthood, one worries about the impact these flawed adults have on their kids. When Cora’s daughter asks about sex, the parents stumble. They begin with procreation then concede that sex isn’t always about babies. The father references male anatomy then concedes that one isn’t required. Finally, he lands on, “you know genitals?”

Beneath the story flows a quiet theme of common existential queries of midlife: do our lives have meaning? What follows our final breath? These themes are more directly explored in Cora's internal dialogues. Considering these passages, one wonders 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? Upon being questioned by Eliot about her affair during an audio program on bondage, Cora thinks “every serious exchange is compromised by specific context”. Some might say enhanced. But that’s not Cora, and Somers doesn’t give the protagonist easy revelations, or stretch her where she is unable to go.

A Final Assessment

The result is an incisive, hilarious, finely observed novel, written with devastating precision. It is absolutely aware of itself, economical yet rich with implication: a portrait of an anxious, loin-girding generation in middle age, chronically embarrassed, at once afraid of and desperate for sensation. Or maybe that’s just the New Yorkers. Let’s say it is.