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Within the novel by Erin Somers The Ten Year Affair, we meet Cora, a woman in her prime who desperately wants a bygone kind of passion with a bygone kind of man. Unfortunately for her, the modern ethical landscape is inflexible and jaded, and instead of having the affair, Cora spends 10 years overthinking it, fantasising about it and discussing it with the object of her desire, Sam – a father from her child's circle who works as “chief storytelling officer” at a mortgage start-up. This novel presents itself as a comic take on the classic adultery novel and a send-up of a particular, self-aware clique of downwardly mobile New Yorkers. It stands as the midlife adultery story this current cohort has coming: an energetic, clever critique of insufferable hand-wringers who’ve somehow spoiled even sex.

Depicting Smug 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 raising children, 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. Their social circle 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 in this new environment, it stems not from her own critical, joyless perspective but because her new neighbours are “dull and vain, duller and vainer than they were back in the city”.

Her husband Eliot remains intellectually lofty and utterly unaware. 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, washing clothes on a stone while he searches for chanterelles. She deeply desires drama, some moral abandon, a partner who will plead, 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 trouble 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” (regarding her career, she claims, but really about everything). What she feels for Sam are “bland, liking-adjacent”. She wants “a transcendent physical experience and escape her own reality momentarily”. But, for years, Sam refuses while Cora languishes. She constructs a parallel reality alongside her real life, where in place of chores and errands, she has passion, luxury, and her imagined lover. As this fantasy dims, her mind conjures “a Gallic character called Baptiste” who joins Sam in assisting her from the tub, “nothing for her to do, no tasks, no obligations, other than to be revered as a youthful bride, who’d died improbably of TB”.

A Disappointing Climax and Undercurrents

When they eventually succumb to temptation, their intimacy is melancholy, lacking in fun or mutual connection. It isn’t the sepia-toned romance she fantasized about for a full decade. Cora dons a slinky dress and Sam “stoically eat[s] her out within their rented space” prior to a meal. One imagines that Cora desires to slip inside a James Salter novel, where intimacy is messy and ambiguous, where imbalances of control exist, and characters act out, and nobody keeps score.

Throughout the novel the core issue for Cora: she possesses a sharp tongue, but so little joy. Of Sam’s erotic photo, Cora complains, “he tightened his stomach and ensured he was aroused, but has not cleared the frame of Crocs”. Since the event that killed their fun 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 acknowledge that sex serves other purposes. The father references male anatomy then admits it is not essential. Ultimately, he settles for, “you're aware of private parts?”

Underpinning the narrative flows a quiet theme of familiar middle-age questions: do our lives have meaning? What follows our final breath? These themes are more directly explored in Cora’s imagined conversations. Reading these exchanges, one wonders what lesson Cora and her jaded circle would take from their disappointing dramas. Would Cora grow more receptive of life’s flawed pleasures, its corny pleasures? When Eliot asks about her affair during an audio program on bondage, Cora thinks “all meaningful communication is compromised by specific context”. Others could argue it's enriched. Yet that is not her nature, and Somers doesn’t give her character false epiphanies, or force growth beyond her capacity.

An Ultimate Appraisal

The result is an incisive, hilarious, finely observed novel, written with devastating precision. It is profoundly self-aware, economical yet rich with implication: a portrait of a worried, self-protective cohort in middle age, chronically embarrassed, simultaneously terrified of and hungry for intense experience. Perhaps this is solely a metropolitan trait. For the sake of argument, we'll assume so.