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In Erin Somers’s The Ten Year Affair, we meet Cora, a woman in her prime who yearns for 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, so rather than embarking on the affair, Cora devotes a full decade obsessively analyzing it, daydreaming of it and talking it over with the object of her desire, Sam – a father from her child's circle 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 sharp satire of a particular, self-aware clique of downwardly mobile New Yorkers. It stands as the definitive narrative of middle-aged unfaithfulness our entire generation deserves: an energetic, clever critique of unbearably anxious individuals who’ve managed to ruin even sex.

A Portrait of Self-Satisfied Unhappiness

Cora and her husband Eliot are highly educated, somewhat arrogant former city dwellers who, with rents rising and children growing, have relocated with hesitation to the suburbs. Trapped by the “exhausting constant demands” of parenthood, they have desk jobs, two children, and an ongoing fungal issue growing under their bathroom tiles that they lack the energy and money to sort out. They spend time with other smug, overeducated Brooklynites who have escaped the metropolis to drink negronis out of mason jars and critique one another amidst a more rural setting. Yet Cora's isolation here, 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”.

Her husband Eliot remains high-minded and oblivious. He eats popcorn as she scrubs the oven 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 searches for chanterelles. She longs for drama, a bit of depravity, a partner who will beg, and adore, and “express raw admiration for her prowess”.

"The mundane grind of everyday existence, one must acknowledge its relentless predictability."

The Problem of Over-Intellectualized Desire

The central conflict is that Cora is just as intellectually constrained as her husband, and incapable of that kind of abandon herself. She finds it "an overwhelming request to feel fervor" (about work, she claims, but really about everything). What she feels for Sam are “tepid, barely beyond simple fondness”. She wants “to get fucked into the astral plane and not think about her life for a second”. But, for years, Sam refuses while Cora pines. She imagines a parallel reality alongside her real life, where instead of bills and school pickups, she has sex and hotels and Sam. As this fantasy dims, she imagines “a Gallic character called Baptiste” who joins Sam in assisting her from the tub, “nothing for her to do, no responsibilities, no requirements, except to be worshipped like someone’s teenage wife, who’d died improbably of TB”.

A Disappointing Conclusion and Undercurrents

When they finally do give in to temptation, the sex is sad, lacking in fun or mutual connection. It fails to be the nostalgically perfect affair she dreamed up for 10 years. Cora puts on a slinky dress and Sam “stoically eat[s] her out within their rented space” prior to a meal. One imagines that Cora wants to slip inside a certain type of literary world, where sex is sordid and confusing, where imbalances of control exist, and characters act out, and no one tallies the cost.

Throughout the novel the core issue for Cora: she possesses a sharp tongue, but so little joy. Of Sam’s erotic photo, Cora critiques, “he tightened his stomach and made sure he was hard, but has not cleared the frame of Crocs”. Given that the catalyst that killed their fun was parenthood, one worries about what these idiots are doing to their children. When Cora’s daughter asks about sex, the parents stumble. They begin with procreation then concede that sex isn’t always about babies. Eliot mentions a penis then concedes that one isn’t required. Finally, he lands on, “you know genitals?”

Beneath the story flows a quiet theme of common existential queries of midlife: do our lives have meaning? Where do we go after death? These ideas are more directly explored in Cora's internal dialogues. Reading these exchanges, the reader may ponder what lesson Cora and her jaded circle would derive from their unsatisfying escapades. 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 reflects “all meaningful communication is compromised by specific context”. Others could argue it's enriched. But that’s not Cora, and Somers doesn’t give the protagonist easy revelations, or stretch her where she is unable to go.

A Final Appraisal

The result is an incisive, uproariously funny, finely observed novel, crafted with devastating precision. It is absolutely aware of itself, economical yet rich with implication: a depiction of an anxious, loin-girding generation entering midlife, perpetually self-conscious, simultaneously terrified of and hungry for intense experience. Perhaps this is solely a metropolitan trait. For the sake of argument, we'll assume so.