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In Erin Somers’s The Ten Year Affair, we meet a millennial mother named Cora, a millennial mother who yearns for a type of romance from another era with a man of a different time. Sadly, for Cora, morality in 2015 is inflexible and jaded, so rather than embarking on the affair, Cora spends 10 years obsessively analyzing it, daydreaming of it and discussing it with her potential lover, Sam – a playgroup dad who holds the title “head narrative architect” at a mortgage start-up. The book presents itself as a humorous twist on the classic adultery novel and a send-up of a particular, self-aware clique of economically slipping New Yorkers. It stands as the midlife adultery story this current cohort has coming: an energetic, clever critique of insufferable hand-wringers who’ve somehow spoiled intimacy itself.

A Portrait of Smug Unhappiness

Cora and her husband 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, two children, and an ongoing fungal issue proliferating beneath 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 closer to nature. But if Cora is lonely here, it’s not because her own critical, joyless perspective but because her new neighbours are “dull and vain, 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 with Eliot in the woods, washing clothes on a stone while he forages for mushrooms. She deeply desires excitement, some moral abandon, 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 Trouble with High-Minded Longing

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 claims, but really about everything). What she feels for Sam are “tepid, barely beyond simple fondness”. She wants “to get fucked into the astral plane and escape her own reality momentarily”. But, for years, Sam demurs while Cora languishes. She imagines a parallel reality running concurrent to her actual existence, where instead of bills and school pickups, she has sex and hotels and Sam. When her fictional romance fizzles, she imagines “a French guy named Baptiste” who teams up with Sam in helping her out of the bath, “nothing for her to do, no tasks, no requirements, except to be worshipped like someone’s teenage wife, tragically lost to illness”.

A Disappointing Conclusion and Deeper Themes

When they eventually succumb to temptation, the sex is sad, without much play or complicity. It fails to be the sepia-toned romance she dreamed up for a full decade. Cora puts on an alluring gown and Sam “performs oral sex with grim determination within their rented space” before dinner. One imagines that Cora desires 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.

Somers consistently suggests the root of Cora’s problem: she has such cutting wit, but so little joy. Regarding an intimate picture from Sam, Cora complains, “he tightened his stomach and made sure he was hard, but has not cleared the frame of Crocs”. Since the event that killed their fun was parenthood, one worries about what these idiots are doing to their children. When Cora’s daughter asks about sex, the parents stumble. They begin with procreation then acknowledge that sex serves other purposes. Eliot mentions a penis then admits it is not essential. Finally, he lands on, “you're aware of private parts?”

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 imagined conversations. Reading these exchanges, 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 flawed pleasures, its sentimental delights? When Eliot asks about her affair during an audio program on bondage, Cora thinks “all meaningful communication is undermined by its particulars”. Some might say enhanced. But that’s not Cora, and the author refuses to grant the protagonist easy revelations, or force growth beyond her capacity.

An Ultimate Assessment

The result is an incisive, hilarious, exquisitely detailed novel, crafted with such withering exactitude. It is profoundly self-aware, spare and brimming with subtext: 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.