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In Erin Somers’s The Ten Year Affair, we meet a millennial mother named Cora, a millennial mother who desperately wants a type of romance from another era with a man of a different time. Sadly, for Cora, the modern ethical landscape is inflexible and jaded, and instead of having the affair, Cora devotes 10 years obsessively analyzing it, fantasising about it and discussing it with the object of her desire, Sam – a playgroup dad who holds the title “chief storytelling officer” at a mortgage start-up. The book presents itself as a comic take on the traditional tale of infidelity and a sharp satire of a particular, self-aware clique of downwardly mobile New Yorkers. It stands as the midlife adultery story this current cohort has coming: a propulsive, witty takedown of insufferable hand-wringers who’ve managed to ruin intimacy itself.

Depicting Self-Satisfied Discontent

The central couple, Cora and Eliot are smug, overeducated Brooklynites who, with rents rising and children growing, have relocated with hesitation upstate. Trapped by the “gruelling all-the-time-ness” of parenthood, they juggle office careers, two children, and an ongoing fungal issue proliferating beneath their bathroom tiles which they cannot afford or muster the will to fix. Their social circle other smug, overeducated Brooklynites who have escaped the metropolis to drink negronis from rustic glassware and judge each other amidst a more rural setting. Yet Cora's isolation in this new environment, it’s not because her fussy, lifeless lens but because her suburban peers are “boring and self-absorbed, even more so than in their previous urban life”.

Eliot is high-minded and oblivious. He snacks casually while she cleans vigorously and states he has no desire to own her. Cora imagines them attempting to endure with Eliot in the woods, doing laundry by hand while he searches for chanterelles. She longs for excitement, a bit of depravity, a partner who will plead, and adore, and “growl at the feet of the woman’s excellence”.

"The shabbiness of real life, one must acknowledge its relentless predictability."

The Problem of Over-Intellectualized Desire

The trouble 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" (about work, she claims, but in truth, about all aspects of life). What she feels for Sam are “bland, liking-adjacent”. She wants “to get fucked into the astral plane and escape her own reality momentarily”. Yet, for a decade, Sam refuses while Cora languishes. She constructs an alternate timeline alongside her real life, where instead of bills and school pickups, she has sex and hotels and Sam. When her fictional romance fizzles, she imagines “a Gallic character called Baptiste” who joins Sam in assisting her from the tub, “leaving her with no duties, no tasks, no obligations, other than to be revered like someone’s teenage wife, tragically lost to illness”.

A Sad Conclusion and Deeper Themes

When they finally do give in to temptation, their intimacy is melancholy, without much play or complicity. It isn’t the sepia-toned romance she dreamed up for a full decade. Cora puts on a slinky dress and Sam “performs oral sex with grim determination within their rented space” before dinner. The reader senses that Cora wants 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 no one tallies the cost.

Somers consistently suggests the core issue for Cora: she has such cutting wit, but a profound lack of happiness. Of Sam’s erotic photo, Cora critiques, “he tightened his stomach and ensured he was aroused, but failed to remove his casual footwear from the shot”. Given that the catalyst that diminished their pleasure was parenthood, readers may fret about the impact these flawed adults have on their kids. When Cora’s daughter asks about sex, the adults fumble. They start with babies then acknowledge that sex serves other purposes. Eliot mentions a penis then concedes that one isn’t required. Finally, he lands on, “you know genitals?”

Underpinning the narrative flows a quiet theme of familiar middle-age questions: do our lives have meaning? What follows our final breath? These ideas are more directly explored in Cora's internal dialogues. Considering these passages, one wonders what lesson Cora and her cynical lot would take from their disappointing dramas. Might Cora become more open to life’s imperfect joys, 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 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

The result is a razor-sharp, uproariously funny, finely observed novel, crafted with such withering exactitude. 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. Perhaps this is solely a metropolitan trait. Let’s say it is.