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In the novel by Erin Somers The Ten Year Affair, the story centers on a millennial mother named Cora, a woman in her prime who yearns for a bygone kind of passion from a bygone kind of man. Sadly, for Cora, morality in 2015 is rigid and cynical, so rather than embarking on the affair, Cora devotes 10 years obsessively analyzing it, daydreaming of it and talking it over with the object of her desire, Sam – a playgroup dad who holds the title “head narrative architect” at a fintech company. The book presents itself as a comic take on the traditional tale of infidelity and a sharp satire of a narrow, self-conscious group of economically slipping New Yorkers. It stands as the definitive narrative of middle-aged unfaithfulness this current cohort deserves: a propulsive, witty takedown of insufferable hand-wringers who’ve somehow spoiled intimacy itself.

Depicting Self-Satisfied Unhappiness

The central couple, Cora and Eliot are smug, overeducated Brooklynites who, with rents rising and children growing, have moved reluctantly upstate. Trapped by the “exhausting constant demands” of raising children, they juggle office careers, two children, and an ongoing fungal issue proliferating beneath their bathroom tiles that they lack the energy and money to sort out. Their social circle similarly minded urban exiles who have fled the city to drink negronis out of mason jars and judge each other 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 suburban peers 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 while she cleans vigorously and states he has no desire to own her. Cora imagines them attempting to endure with Eliot in the woods, doing laundry by hand while he searches for chanterelles. She longs for drama, some moral abandon, a lover who will beg, and adore, and “express raw admiration for her prowess”.

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

The Problem of High-Minded Longing

The trouble is that Cora is just as intellectually constrained as her husband, and unable to surrender to primal passion. It’s “too much to ask her to be passionate” (about work, she says, but in truth, about all aspects of life). What she feels for Sam are “tepid, barely beyond simple fondness”. She craves “a transcendent physical experience and not think about her life for a second”. But, for years, Sam demurs while Cora pines. She imagines an alternate timeline alongside her real life, where instead of bills and school pickups, she has passion, luxury, and her imagined lover. When her fictional romance fizzles, she imagines “a French guy named Baptiste” who joins Sam in assisting her from the tub, “leaving her with no duties, no tasks, no requirements, except to be worshipped like someone’s teenage wife, tragically lost to illness”.

A Disappointing Conclusion and Undercurrents

When they eventually succumb to temptation, 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 dons a slinky dress and Sam “performs oral sex with grim determination in their hotel room” prior to a meal. The reader senses that Cora desires to slip inside a certain type of literary world, 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 critiques, “he tightened his stomach and made sure he was hard, but failed to remove his casual footwear from the shot”. Since the event that killed their fun was parenthood, readers may fret about the impact these flawed adults have on their kids. As her daughter inquires about sex, the parents stumble. They start with babies then concede that sex serves other purposes. The father references male anatomy then concedes that one isn’t required. Ultimately, he settles for, “you know genitals?”

Beneath the story runs the subtle undercurrent of familiar middle-age questions: do our lives have meaning? Where do we go after death? These themes are more explicit in Cora's internal dialogues. Considering these passages, 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? Upon being questioned by Eliot about her affair in the middle of a podcast about rope, Cora reflects “every serious exchange is undermined by its particulars”. Others could argue it's enriched. Yet that is not her nature, and the author refuses to grant her character false epiphanies, or force growth beyond her capacity.

An Ultimate Appraisal

The result is an incisive, uproariously funny, finely observed novel, written with such withering exactitude. It is absolutely aware of itself, economical yet rich with implication: 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. Let’s say it is.