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In the novel by Erin Somers The Ten Year Affair, the story centers on a millennial mother named Cora, a millennial mother who yearns for a type of romance from another era from a bygone kind of man. Sadly, for Cora, the modern ethical landscape is inflexible and jaded, and instead of having the affair, Cora spends 10 years obsessively analyzing it, daydreaming of it and discussing it with the object of her desire, Sam – a father from her child's circle who works as “chief storytelling officer” at a fintech company. The book positions itself as a humorous twist on the traditional tale of infidelity and a sharp satire of a particular, self-aware clique of downwardly mobile New Yorkers. One could call it the midlife adultery story this current cohort has coming: a propulsive, witty takedown of unbearably anxious individuals who’ve managed to ruin even sex.

A Portrait of Self-Satisfied Discontent

Cora and her husband Eliot are smug, overeducated Brooklynites who, with rents rising and children growing, have relocated with hesitation upstate. Trapped by the “exhausting constant demands” of parenthood, they juggle desk jobs, a pair of kids, and an ongoing fungal issue 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 judge each other amidst a more rural setting. But if Cora is lonely in this new environment, it’s not because her own critical, joyless perspective but because her suburban peers are “boring and self-absorbed, duller and vainer than they were back in the city”.

Her husband Eliot remains intellectually lofty and utterly unaware. He snacks casually while she cleans vigorously and says he doesn’t wish to possess her. Cora imagines them attempting to endure a rustic life together, washing clothes on a stone while he forages for mushrooms. She longs for drama, a bit of depravity, a partner who will beg, and worship, and “growl at the feet of the woman’s excellence”.

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

The Problem of High-Minded Desire

The trouble is that she’s as high-minded and rigid as Eliot, and incapable of that kind of abandon herself. It’s “too much to ask her to be passionate” (regarding her career, she claims, but in truth, about all aspects of life). What she feels for Sam are “tepid, barely beyond simple fondness”. She wants “a transcendent physical experience and escape her own reality momentarily”. But, for years, Sam refuses while Cora pines. She imagines an alternate timeline alongside her real life, where in place of chores and errands, she has sex and hotels and Sam. When her fictional romance fizzles, her mind conjures “a Gallic character called Baptiste” who joins Sam in helping her out of the bath, “leaving her with no duties, no tasks, no obligations, other than to be revered like someone’s teenage wife, who’d died improbably of TB”.

A Disappointing Climax and Deeper Themes

When they finally do give in to their desires, the sex is sad, lacking in fun or mutual connection. It isn’t the sepia-toned romance she fantasized about for a full decade. Cora dons a slinky dress and Sam “performs oral sex with grim determination within their rented space” prior to a meal. The reader senses that Cora desires to inhabit a James Salter novel, where intimacy is messy and ambiguous, where the power dynamics are unequal, and everyone misbehaves, and nobody keeps score.

Somers consistently suggests the core issue for Cora: she possesses a sharp tongue, but a profound lack of happiness. Of Sam’s erotic photo, Cora complains, “he tightened his stomach 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 the impact these flawed adults have on their kids. As her daughter inquires about sex, the adults fumble. They start with babies then concede that sex isn’t always about babies. The father references male anatomy then admits it is not essential. Finally, he lands on, “you know genitals?”

Beneath the story flows a quiet theme of familiar middle-age questions: is there purpose to our existence? Where do we go after death? These ideas are more explicit in Cora's internal dialogues. Reading these exchanges, one wonders what moral Cora and her cynical lot would take from their unsatisfying escapades. Would Cora grow more receptive of life’s imperfect joys, its corny pleasures? When Eliot asks about her affair in the middle of a podcast about rope, Cora thinks “all meaningful communication is undermined by its particulars”. Others could argue it's enriched. Yet that is not her nature, and the author refuses to grant the protagonist easy revelations, 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 absolutely aware of itself, spare and brimming with subtext: a portrait of a worried, self-protective cohort in middle age, 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.