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In the novel by Erin Somers The Ten Year Affair, the story centers on a millennial mother named Cora, a millennial mother who desperately wants a bygone kind of passion from a bygone kind of man. Unfortunately for her, the modern ethical landscape is rigid and cynical, and instead of having the affair, Cora devotes a full decade overthinking it, fantasising about it and talking it over with her potential lover, Sam – a playgroup dad who works as “head narrative architect” at a mortgage start-up. The book positions itself as a humorous twist on the traditional tale of infidelity and a send-up of a narrow, self-conscious group of downwardly mobile New Yorkers. It stands as the definitive narrative of middle-aged unfaithfulness our entire generation deserves: a propulsive, witty takedown of insufferable hand-wringers who’ve managed to ruin intimacy itself.

A Portrait of Self-Satisfied 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 to the suburbs. Caught in the “gruelling all-the-time-ness” of parenthood, they juggle office careers, a pair of kids, and a persistent mushroom 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 from rustic glassware and judge each other amidst a more rural setting. Yet Cora's isolation here, it stems not from her fussy, lifeless lens but because her suburban peers are “boring and self-absorbed, even more so than in their previous urban life”.

Her husband Eliot remains intellectually lofty and utterly unaware. He snacks casually while she cleans vigorously and states he has no desire to own her. In her mind, Cora pictures them attempting to endure with Eliot in the woods, doing laundry by hand while he searches for chanterelles. She longs for excitement, some moral abandon, a partner who will plead, and adore, and “express raw admiration for her prowess”.

"The shabbiness of real life, you had to admire its consistency."

The Problem of Over-Intellectualized 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 really about everything). Her feelings for Sam are “bland, liking-adjacent”. She craves “a transcendent physical experience and not think about her life for a second”. Yet, for a decade, Sam demurs while Cora pines. She imagines an alternate timeline running concurrent to her actual existence, where instead of bills and school pickups, she has sex and hotels and Sam. As this fantasy dims, she imagines “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, except to be worshipped as a youthful bride, tragically lost to illness”.

A Sad Climax and Deeper Themes

When they eventually succumb to their desires, their intimacy is melancholy, without much play or complicity. It isn’t the nostalgically perfect affair she dreamed up for a full decade. Cora dons a slinky dress and Sam “stoically eat[s] her out in their hotel room” before dinner. The reader senses that Cora desires to inhabit a James Salter novel, where sex is sordid and confusing, where the power dynamics are unequal, and characters act out, and nobody keeps score.

Somers consistently suggests the root of Cora’s problem: 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 failed to remove his casual footwear from the shot”. Since the event that killed their fun was having children, readers may fret about what these idiots are doing to their children. As her daughter inquires about sex, the parents stumble. They start with babies then acknowledge 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 runs the subtle undercurrent of familiar middle-age questions: 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 jaded circle would take from their disappointing dramas. Might Cora become more receptive of life’s imperfect joys, its corny pleasures? Upon being questioned by Eliot about her affair during an audio program on bondage, Cora reflects “every serious exchange is undermined by its particulars”. Others could argue it's enriched. But that’s not Cora, and the author refuses to grant the protagonist easy revelations, or force growth beyond her capacity.

A Final Appraisal

This is a razor-sharp, uproariously funny, finely observed novel, crafted with devastating precision. It is profoundly self-aware, economical yet rich with implication: a depiction of a worried, self-protective cohort entering midlife, perpetually self-conscious, simultaneously terrified of and hungry for intense experience. Or maybe that’s just the New Yorkers. Let’s say it is.