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Within Erin Somers’s The Ten Year Affair, the story centers on Cora, a woman in her prime who yearns for a type of romance from another era from a man of a different time. Unfortunately for her, morality in 2015 is inflexible and jaded, and instead of having the affair, Cora devotes 10 years overthinking it, daydreaming of it and talking it over with her potential lover, Sam – a father from her child's circle who holds the title “chief storytelling officer” at a fintech company. This novel presents itself as a humorous twist on the classic adultery novel and a sharp satire of a narrow, self-conscious group of economically slipping New Yorkers. One could call it the midlife adultery story our entire generation deserves: a propulsive, witty takedown of unbearably anxious individuals who’ve somehow spoiled intimacy itself.

Depicting Smug Discontent

The central couple, Cora and Eliot are highly educated, somewhat arrogant former city dwellers who, with rents rising and children growing, have relocated with hesitation upstate. Caught in the “gruelling all-the-time-ness” of raising children, they have desk jobs, a pair of kids, and an ongoing fungal issue proliferating beneath 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 from rustic glassware and judge each other closer to nature. But if Cora is lonely in this new environment, it stems not from her fussy, lifeless lens but because her suburban peers are “dull and vain, duller and vainer than they were back in the city”.

Eliot is intellectually lofty and utterly unaware. He eats popcorn while she cleans vigorously and says he doesn’t wish to possess her. Cora imagines them attempting to endure with Eliot in the woods, doing laundry by hand while he forages for mushrooms. She deeply desires excitement, a bit of depravity, a lover who will beg, and worship, and “express raw admiration for her prowess”.

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

The Problem of Over-Intellectualized Longing

The central conflict 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" (regarding her career, she claims, but really about everything). What she feels for Sam are “tepid, barely beyond simple fondness”. She craves “a transcendent physical experience and escape her own reality momentarily”. But, for years, Sam demurs while Cora languishes. She imagines an alternate timeline running concurrent to her actual existence, where in place of chores and errands, she has sex and hotels and Sam. When her fictional romance fizzles, her mind conjures “a French guy named Baptiste” who joins Sam in assisting her from the tub, “leaving her with no duties, no tasks, no obligations, except to be worshipped like someone’s teenage wife, who’d died improbably of TB”.

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 an alluring gown 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 certain type of literary world, where intimacy is messy and ambiguous, where imbalances of control exist, and characters act out, and no one tallies the cost.

Throughout the novel the core issue for Cora: she has such cutting wit, 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 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 parents stumble. They begin with procreation 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're aware of private parts?”

Underpinning the narrative runs the subtle undercurrent of common existential queries of midlife: do our lives have meaning? Where do we go after death? These themes are more directly explored in Cora's internal dialogues. Reading these exchanges, one wonders what moral Cora and her cynical lot would take from their unsatisfying escapades. Might Cora become more receptive of life’s flawed pleasures, its sentimental delights? When Eliot asks 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. But that’s not Cora, and the author refuses to grant the protagonist easy revelations, or force growth beyond her capacity.

A Final Assessment

The result is a razor-sharp, hilarious, finely observed novel, crafted with such withering exactitude. It is profoundly self-aware, spare and brimming with subtext: a portrait of a worried, self-protective cohort entering midlife, perpetually self-conscious, simultaneously terrified of and hungry for intense experience. Perhaps this is solely a metropolitan trait. Let’s say it is.