The Ten Year Affair by author Erin Somers: A Middle-Aged Adultery Story Our Era Deserves.

In the novel by Erin Somers The Ten Year Affair, we meet Cora, a millennial mother who yearns for a bygone kind of passion with a bygone kind of man. Sadly, for Cora, the modern ethical landscape is rigid and cynical, so rather than embarking on the affair, Cora spends a full decade obsessively analyzing it, daydreaming of it and discussing it with the object of her desire, Sam – a playgroup dad who works as “chief storytelling officer” at a mortgage start-up. The book positions itself as a comic take on the traditional tale of infidelity and a send-up of a particular, self-aware clique of downwardly mobile New Yorkers. It stands as the definitive narrative of middle-aged unfaithfulness this current cohort deserves: an energetic, clever critique of unbearably anxious individuals who’ve somehow spoiled intimacy itself.

Depicting Self-Satisfied Unhappiness

Cora and her husband Eliot are smug, overeducated Brooklynites who, as costs increased and their family expanded, have moved reluctantly to the suburbs. Trapped by the “exhausting constant demands” of parenthood, they juggle office careers, two children, and an ongoing fungal issue growing under their bathroom tiles which they cannot afford or muster the will to fix. They spend time with similarly minded urban exiles who have fled the city to sip craft cocktails out of mason jars and judge each other closer to nature. Yet Cora's isolation here, it’s not because 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 high-minded and oblivious. He snacks casually 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 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 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). Her feelings for Sam are “bland, liking-adjacent”. 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 alongside her real life, where instead of bills and school pickups, she has sex and hotels and Sam. When her fictional romance fizzles, her mind conjures “a French guy named Baptiste” who teams up with Sam in assisting her from the tub, “leaving her with no duties, no responsibilities, no requirements, other than to be revered like someone’s teenage wife, tragically lost to illness”.

A Sad Climax and Undercurrents

When they finally do give in to temptation, their intimacy is melancholy, 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 “performs oral sex with grim determination within their rented space” before dinner. One imagines that Cora desires to slip inside a James Salter novel, where sex is sordid and confusing, where imbalances of control exist, and everyone misbehaves, and no one tallies the cost.

Throughout the novel the root of Cora’s problem: she possesses a sharp tongue, but a profound lack of happiness. Of Sam’s erotic photo, Cora complains, “he tightened his stomach and ensured he was aroused, but failed to remove his casual footwear from the shot”. Since the event that diminished their pleasure was having children, one worries about the impact these flawed adults have on their kids. When Cora’s daughter asks about sex, the adults fumble. 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're aware of private parts?”

Beneath the story flows a quiet theme of common existential queries of midlife: is there purpose to our existence? What follows our final breath? These ideas are more explicit in Cora’s imagined conversations. Reading these exchanges, one wonders what lesson Cora and her cynical lot would take from their disappointing dramas. Would Cora grow more open to life’s flawed pleasures, its sentimental delights? When Eliot asks about her affair in the middle of a podcast about rope, Cora thinks “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 force growth beyond her capacity.

An Ultimate Assessment

The result is an incisive, hilarious, finely observed novel, written with such withering exactitude. It is profoundly self-aware, spare and brimming with subtext: a portrait of a worried, self-protective cohort in middle age, perpetually self-conscious, simultaneously terrified of and hungry for intense experience. Or maybe that’s just the New Yorkers. For the sake of argument, we'll assume so.