🔗 Share this article

In the novel by Erin Somers The Ten Year Affair, the story centers on Cora, a millennial mother who craves a bygone kind of passion with a bygone kind of man. Sadly, for Cora, the modern ethical landscape is inflexible and jaded, and instead of having the affair, Cora spends a full decade overthinking it, daydreaming of 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. This novel positions itself as a comic take 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 this current cohort has coming: a propulsive, witty takedown of unbearably anxious individuals who’ve somehow spoiled even sex.

Depicting Self-Satisfied Unhappiness

The central couple, Cora and Eliot are smug, overeducated Brooklynites who, with rents rising and children growing, have moved reluctantly to the suburbs. Caught in the “exhausting constant demands” of parenthood, they juggle desk jobs, two children, and an ongoing fungal issue growing under their bathroom tiles which they cannot afford or muster the will to fix. They spend time with other smug, overeducated Brooklynites who have fled the city to sip craft cocktails 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 own critical, joyless perspective but because her new neighbours 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 says he doesn’t wish to possess her. Cora imagines herself trying to survive a rustic life together, washing clothes on a stone while he searches for chanterelles. She longs for excitement, a bit of depravity, a partner who will beg, and adore, and “express raw admiration for her prowess”.

"The mundane grind of everyday existence, you had to admire its consistency."

The Problem of Over-Intellectualized Longing

The central conflict 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" (about work, she claims, but really about everything). Her feelings for Sam are “bland, liking-adjacent”. She craves “a transcendent physical experience and not think about her life for a second”. But, for years, Sam demurs while Cora languishes. 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 French guy named Baptiste” who joins Sam in helping her out of the bath, “nothing for her to do, no responsibilities, no obligations, except to be worshipped like someone’s teenage wife, tragically lost to illness”.

A Sad Conclusion and Deeper Themes

When they eventually succumb to their desires, the sex is sad, without much play or complicity. It fails to be the nostalgically perfect affair she fantasized about for 10 years. Cora dons a slinky dress 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 intimacy is messy and ambiguous, where the power dynamics are unequal, and characters act out, and no one tallies the cost.

Somers consistently suggests the core issue for Cora: she possesses a sharp tongue, but so little joy. Regarding an intimate picture from Sam, Cora complains, “he has clenched his abs and made sure he was hard, but has not cleared the frame of Crocs”. Given that the catalyst 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 adults fumble. They start with babies then concede that sex serves other purposes. The father references male anatomy then admits it is not essential. Ultimately, he settles for, “you're aware of private parts?”

Beneath the story runs the subtle undercurrent of familiar middle-age questions: do our lives have meaning? Where do we go after death? These ideas are more explicit in Cora's internal dialogues. Considering these passages, one wonders what lesson Cora and her jaded circle would take from their unsatisfying escapades. Would Cora grow more open to life’s flawed pleasures, its sentimental delights? Upon being questioned by Eliot 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 Somers doesn’t give her character false epiphanies, or stretch her where she is unable to go.

A Final Assessment

The result is a razor-sharp, uproariously funny, finely observed novel, written with devastating precision. It is absolutely aware of itself, spare and brimming with subtext: a depiction of a worried, self-protective cohort 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.