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Within Erin Somers’s The Ten Year Affair, the story centers on a millennial mother named Cora, a woman in her prime who yearns for a bygone kind of passion with a man of a different time. Sadly, for Cora, the modern ethical landscape is inflexible and jaded, so rather than embarking on the affair, Cora spends a full decade obsessively analyzing it, daydreaming of it and talking it over with her potential lover, Sam – a playgroup dad who works as “head narrative architect” at a fintech company. The book positions itself as a humorous twist on the traditional tale of infidelity and a send-up of a narrow, self-conscious group of economically slipping New Yorkers. One could call it the definitive narrative of middle-aged unfaithfulness our entire generation has coming: a propulsive, witty takedown of insufferable hand-wringers who’ve managed to ruin even sex.

A Portrait of Self-Satisfied Discontent

The central couple, Cora and Eliot are highly educated, somewhat arrogant former city dwellers who, as costs increased and their family expanded, have relocated with hesitation to the suburbs. Caught in the “gruelling all-the-time-ness” of parenthood, they juggle office careers, two children, and an ongoing fungal issue growing under their bathroom tiles that they lack the energy and money to sort out. Their social circle other smug, overeducated Brooklynites who have escaped the metropolis to drink negronis from rustic glassware and critique one another amidst a more rural setting. But if Cora is lonely in this new environment, it stems not from her fussy, lifeless lens but because her new neighbours are “boring and self-absorbed, duller and vainer than they were back in the city”.

Eliot is high-minded and oblivious. He snacks casually as she scrubs the oven and states he has no desire to own her. In her mind, Cora pictures them attempting to endure with Eliot in the woods, washing clothes on a stone while he forages for mushrooms. She deeply desires excitement, a bit of depravity, a lover who will plead, and adore, and “growl at the feet of the woman’s excellence”.

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

The Problem of High-Minded 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" (regarding her career, she claims, but really about everything). Her feelings for Sam are “tepid, barely beyond simple fondness”. She wants “a transcendent physical experience and not think about her life for a second”. But, for years, Sam refuses while Cora languishes. She imagines an alternate timeline running concurrent to her actual existence, where in place of chores and errands, she has passion, luxury, and her imagined lover. As this fantasy dims, she imagines “a Gallic character called Baptiste” who joins Sam in helping her out of the bath, “leaving her with no duties, no responsibilities, no obligations, except to be worshipped as a youthful bride, who’d died improbably of TB”.

A Sad Climax and Undercurrents

When they finally do give in to their desires, the sex is sad, lacking in fun or mutual connection. It isn’t the nostalgically perfect affair she fantasized about for a full decade. Cora dons a slinky dress and Sam “stoically eat[s] her out in their hotel room” prior to a meal. The reader senses that Cora wants to slip inside 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.

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 ensured he was aroused, but has not cleared the frame of Crocs”. Since the event that killed their fun was having children, readers may fret about what these idiots are doing to their children. As her daughter inquires about sex, the parents stumble. They start with babies then acknowledge that sex isn’t always about babies. Eliot mentions a penis then concedes that one isn’t required. Ultimately, he settles for, “you know genitals?”

Underpinning the narrative runs the subtle undercurrent of common existential queries of midlife: is there purpose to our existence? Where do we go after death? These themes are more directly explored in Cora's internal dialogues. Considering these passages, one wonders what lesson Cora and her cynical lot would derive from their disappointing dramas. Would Cora grow more open to life’s flawed pleasures, its sentimental delights? Upon being questioned by Eliot about her affair during an audio program on bondage, Cora thinks “every serious exchange is undermined by its particulars”. Others could argue it's enriched. Yet that is not her nature, and Somers doesn’t give her character false epiphanies, or stretch her where she is unable to go.

A Final Assessment

This is an incisive, uproariously funny, finely observed novel, written with devastating precision. It is profoundly self-aware, economical yet rich with implication: a portrait of an anxious, loin-girding generation in middle age, perpetually self-conscious, simultaneously terrified of and hungry for intense experience. Or maybe that’s just the New Yorkers. For the sake of argument, we'll assume so.