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In the novel by Erin Somers The Ten Year Affair, we meet Cora, a woman in her prime who yearns for a type of romance from another era with a bygone kind of man. Sadly, for Cora, morality in 2015 is rigid and cynical, so rather than embarking on the affair, Cora devotes a full decade overthinking it, fantasising about it and talking it over with the object of her desire, Sam – a playgroup dad who works as “chief storytelling officer” at a fintech company. The book positions itself as a comic take on the classic adultery novel and a sharp satire of a narrow, self-conscious group of downwardly mobile New Yorkers. It stands as the midlife adultery story this current cohort has coming: a propulsive, witty takedown of unbearably anxious individuals who’ve somehow spoiled intimacy itself.

A Portrait of Smug Unhappiness

The central couple, Cora and Eliot are highly educated, somewhat arrogant former city dwellers who, as costs increased and their family expanded, have moved reluctantly 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. Their social circle similarly minded urban exiles who have fled the city to sip craft cocktails from rustic glassware and judge each other amidst a more rural setting. Yet Cora's isolation in this new environment, it’s not because her own critical, joyless perspective but because her suburban peers are “dull and vain, duller and vainer than they were back in the city”.

Her husband Eliot remains high-minded and oblivious. He snacks casually as she scrubs the oven and says he doesn’t wish to possess her. Cora imagines herself trying to survive a rustic life together, washing clothes on a stone while he forages for mushrooms. She deeply desires drama, some moral abandon, a partner who will plead, and adore, and “growl at the feet of the woman’s excellence”.

"The mundane grind of everyday existence, you had to admire its consistency."

The Trouble with Over-Intellectualized Desire

The central conflict is that Cora is just as intellectually constrained as her husband, and unable to surrender to primal passion. She finds it "an overwhelming request to feel fervor" (regarding her career, she claims, but really about everything). Her feelings for Sam are “bland, liking-adjacent”. She wants “to get fucked into the astral plane and escape her own reality momentarily”. Yet, for a decade, Sam demurs while Cora pines. She imagines an alternate timeline running concurrent to her actual existence, where in place of chores and errands, she has passion, luxury, and her imagined lover. When her fictional romance fizzles, her mind conjures “a Gallic character called Baptiste” who teams up with Sam in helping her out of the bath, “leaving her with no duties, no tasks, no obligations, other than to be revered like someone’s teenage wife, who’d died improbably of TB”.

A Disappointing Conclusion and Undercurrents

When they eventually succumb to their desires, their intimacy is melancholy, lacking in fun or mutual connection. It fails to be the nostalgically perfect affair she fantasized about for a full decade. Cora puts on a slinky dress and Sam “performs oral sex with grim determination within their rented space” before dinner. The reader senses that Cora desires to slip inside a certain type of literary world, where intimacy is messy and ambiguous, where the power dynamics are unequal, and everyone misbehaves, 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 ensured he was aroused, but has not cleared the frame of Crocs”. 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 start with babies then concede that sex isn’t always about babies. The father references male anatomy then concedes that one isn’t required. Ultimately, he settles for, “you're aware of private parts?”

Underpinning the narrative flows a quiet theme of common existential queries of midlife: do our lives have meaning? What follows our final breath? These ideas are more directly explored in Cora's internal dialogues. Considering these passages, the reader may ponder what lesson Cora and her cynical lot would take from their unsatisfying escapades. Would Cora grow more receptive of life’s flawed pleasures, its corny pleasures? Upon being questioned by Eliot about her affair in the middle of a podcast about rope, Cora reflects “every serious exchange is compromised by specific context”. Others could argue it's enriched. But that’s not Cora, and the author refuses to grant her character false epiphanies, or force growth beyond her capacity.

An Ultimate Appraisal

The result is an incisive, hilarious, exquisitely detailed novel, crafted with devastating precision. It is profoundly self-aware, spare and brimming with subtext: a depiction of an anxious, loin-girding generation in middle age, perpetually self-conscious, at once afraid of and desperate for sensation. Perhaps this is solely a metropolitan trait. Let’s say it is.