🔗 Share this article

Within Erin Somers’s The Ten Year Affair, we meet Cora, a millennial mother who yearns for a type of romance from another era with a man of a different time. Unfortunately for her, the modern ethical landscape is rigid and cynical, and instead of having the affair, Cora devotes a full decade overthinking it, daydreaming of it and talking it over with her potential lover, Sam – a playgroup dad who works as “head narrative architect” at a mortgage start-up. This novel positions itself as a comic take on the traditional tale of infidelity and a send-up of a narrow, self-conscious group of downwardly mobile New Yorkers. It stands as the definitive narrative of middle-aged unfaithfulness this current cohort has coming: an energetic, clever critique of unbearably anxious individuals who’ve somehow spoiled even sex.

Depicting Smug Discontent

Cora and her husband Eliot are highly educated, somewhat arrogant former city dwellers who, with rents rising and children growing, have moved reluctantly upstate. Caught in the “exhausting constant demands” of raising children, they have office careers, a pair of kids, and a persistent mushroom growing under 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 sip craft cocktails out of mason jars and critique one another amidst a more rural setting. But if Cora is lonely here, it’s not because her fussy, lifeless lens but because her suburban peers are “dull and vain, duller and vainer than they were back in the city”.

Her husband Eliot remains intellectually lofty and utterly unaware. He eats popcorn 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 searches for chanterelles. She deeply desires excitement, a bit of depravity, a partner who will plead, and adore, and “express raw admiration for her prowess”.

"The shabbiness of real life, you had to admire its consistency."

The Trouble with Over-Intellectualized Desire

The trouble is that Cora is just as intellectually constrained as her husband, and unable to surrender to primal passion. It’s “too much to ask her to be passionate” (about work, she claims, 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”. But, for years, Sam demurs while Cora pines. She constructs an alternate timeline running concurrent to her actual existence, where instead of bills and school pickups, she has sex and hotels and Sam. As this fantasy dims, her mind conjures “a French guy named Baptiste” who joins Sam in helping her out of the bath, “nothing for her to do, no tasks, no obligations, except to be worshipped as a youthful bride, tragically lost to illness”.

A Sad Climax and Undercurrents

When they finally do give in to temptation, the sex is sad, without much play or complicity. It fails to be the nostalgically perfect affair she dreamed up for 10 years. Cora puts on an alluring gown and Sam “performs oral sex with grim determination in their hotel room” before dinner. The reader senses that Cora wants to inhabit a certain type of literary world, where sex is sordid and confusing, where the power dynamics are unequal, and characters act out, and nobody keeps score.

Throughout the novel the root of Cora’s problem: she possesses a sharp tongue, but so little joy. Regarding an intimate picture from Sam, Cora critiques, “he has clenched his abs and ensured he was aroused, but failed to remove his casual footwear from the shot”. Given that the catalyst that killed their fun was having children, readers may fret about what these idiots are doing to their children. When Cora’s daughter asks about sex, the parents stumble. They begin with procreation then concede that sex serves other purposes. The father references male anatomy then concedes that one isn’t required. Finally, he lands on, “you're aware of private parts?”

Beneath the story runs the subtle undercurrent of common existential queries of midlife: is there purpose to our existence? Where do we go after death? These ideas are more directly explored in Cora’s imagined conversations. Reading these exchanges, one wonders what lesson Cora and her cynical lot would take from their disappointing dramas. Would Cora grow more open to life’s flawed pleasures, its corny pleasures? Upon being questioned by Eliot about her affair in the middle of a podcast about rope, Cora reflects “all meaningful communication is compromised by specific context”. Others could argue it's enriched. Yet that is not her nature, and the author refuses to grant her character false epiphanies, or stretch her where she is unable to go.

An Ultimate Assessment

This is an incisive, uproariously funny, exquisitely detailed novel, crafted with devastating precision. It is profoundly self-aware, economical yet rich with implication: a depiction of a worried, self-protective cohort entering midlife, chronically embarrassed, simultaneously terrified of and hungry for intense experience. Perhaps this is solely a metropolitan trait. For the sake of argument, we'll assume so.