🔗 Share this article

In the novel by Erin Somers The Ten Year Affair, we meet a millennial mother named Cora, a millennial mother who craves a bygone kind of passion from a bygone kind of man. Unfortunately for her, 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 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 comic take on the classic adultery novel and a sharp satire of a particular, self-aware clique of economically slipping New Yorkers. One could call it 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 Self-Satisfied Discontent

Cora and her husband Eliot are smug, overeducated Brooklynites who, with rents rising and children growing, have moved reluctantly to the suburbs. Caught in the “gruelling all-the-time-ness” of parenthood, they have 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 other smug, overeducated Brooklynites who have fled the city to drink negronis from rustic glassware and judge each other closer to nature. But if Cora is lonely here, it stems not from her own critical, joyless perspective 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 says he doesn’t wish to possess her. In her mind, Cora pictures them attempting to endure a rustic life together, doing laundry by hand 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 shabbiness of real life, you had to admire its consistency."

The Problem of High-Minded Longing

The central conflict is that Cora is just as intellectually constrained as her husband, and incapable of that kind of abandon herself. 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 refuses while Cora languishes. She imagines an alternate timeline alongside her real life, where instead of bills and school pickups, she has passion, luxury, and her imagined lover. As this fantasy dims, her mind conjures “a French guy named Baptiste” who joins Sam in assisting her from the tub, “nothing for her to do, no responsibilities, no requirements, except to be worshipped as a youthful bride, who’d died improbably of TB”.

A Sad Conclusion and Deeper Themes

When they eventually succumb to their desires, their intimacy is melancholy, without much play or complicity. It isn’t the sepia-toned romance she dreamed up for 10 years. Cora dons a slinky dress and Sam “performs oral sex with grim determination in their hotel room” before dinner. 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 characters act out, and nobody keeps score.

Throughout the novel the core issue for Cora: she possesses a sharp tongue, but a profound lack of happiness. Regarding an intimate picture from Sam, Cora complains, “he has clenched his abs and made sure he was hard, but has not cleared the frame of Crocs”. Since the event that diminished their pleasure was parenthood, readers may fret about what these idiots are doing to their children. As her daughter inquires about sex, the adults fumble. They start with babies then concede that sex serves other purposes. Eliot mentions a penis then concedes that one isn’t required. 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. Considering these passages, the reader may ponder what lesson Cora and her cynical lot would take from their unsatisfying escapades. Might Cora become more receptive of life’s flawed pleasures, its sentimental delights? Upon being questioned by Eliot about her affair in the middle of a podcast about rope, Cora reflects “every serious exchange is undermined by its particulars”. Others could argue it's enriched. But that’s not Cora, and Somers doesn’t give her character false epiphanies, or force growth beyond her capacity.

A Final Assessment

The result is a razor-sharp, uproariously funny, finely observed novel, crafted with devastating precision. It is profoundly self-aware, economical yet rich with implication: a portrait of an anxious, loin-girding generation in middle age, chronically embarrassed, simultaneously terrified of and hungry for intense experience. Perhaps this is solely a metropolitan trait. Let’s say it is.