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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. Sadly, for Cora, morality in 2015 is inflexible and jaded, and instead of having the affair, Cora spends 10 years obsessively analyzing it, daydreaming of it and discussing it with the object of her desire, Sam – a father from her child's circle who works as “head narrative architect” at a mortgage start-up. The book presents itself as a comic take on the traditional tale of infidelity and a send-up of a narrow, self-conscious group of economically slipping New Yorkers. One could call it the midlife adultery story our entire generation has coming: an energetic, clever critique of unbearably anxious individuals who’ve somehow spoiled intimacy itself.

A Portrait of Smug Discontent

Cora and her husband Eliot are highly educated, somewhat arrogant former city dwellers who, with rents rising and children growing, have relocated with hesitation upstate. Caught in the “gruelling all-the-time-ness” of raising children, they have office careers, two children, and an ongoing fungal issue proliferating beneath their bathroom tiles which they cannot afford or muster the will to fix. They spend time with similarly minded urban exiles who have escaped the metropolis to drink negronis from rustic glassware and critique one another closer to nature. Yet Cora's isolation in this new environment, it’s not because 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”.

Eliot is high-minded and oblivious. He eats popcorn as she scrubs the oven and says he doesn’t wish to possess her. In her mind, Cora pictures herself trying to survive a rustic life together, washing clothes on a stone while he forages for mushrooms. She deeply desires excitement, some moral abandon, a lover who will plead, and adore, and “growl at the feet of the woman’s excellence”.

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

The Problem of Over-Intellectualized Longing

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 says, but really about everything). What she feels for Sam are “tepid, barely beyond simple fondness”. She wants “a transcendent physical experience and not think about her life for a second”. Yet, for a decade, Sam demurs while Cora pines. She imagines a parallel reality alongside her real life, where instead of bills and school pickups, she has sex and hotels and Sam. As this fantasy dims, she imagines “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, except to be worshipped like someone’s teenage wife, who’d died improbably of TB”.

A Disappointing Conclusion and Deeper Themes

When they finally do give in to temptation, their intimacy is melancholy, without much play or complicity. It fails to be the nostalgically perfect affair she fantasized about for a full decade. Cora puts on an alluring gown and Sam “performs oral sex with grim determination in their hotel room” before dinner. One imagines that Cora wants to inhabit a certain type of literary world, where intimacy is messy and ambiguous, where the power dynamics are unequal, and everyone misbehaves, and nobody keeps score.

Somers consistently suggests the core issue for Cora: she has such cutting wit, but a profound lack of happiness. Regarding an intimate picture from Sam, Cora complains, “he has clenched his abs and ensured he was aroused, but failed to remove his casual footwear from the shot”. Given that the catalyst 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 adults fumble. 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?”

Underpinning the narrative runs the subtle undercurrent of common existential queries of midlife: do our lives have meaning? Where do we go after death? These ideas are more explicit in Cora's internal dialogues. Reading these exchanges, the reader may ponder what moral Cora and her cynical lot would take from their unsatisfying escapades. Would Cora grow more receptive of life’s imperfect joys, its sentimental delights? When Eliot asks about her affair during an audio program on bondage, Cora reflects “every serious exchange is undermined by its particulars”. Some might say enhanced. Yet that is not her nature, and Somers doesn’t give her character false epiphanies, or force growth beyond her capacity.

A Final Appraisal

This is a razor-sharp, hilarious, exquisitely detailed novel, written with devastating precision. It is absolutely aware of itself, economical yet rich with implication: a portrait of a worried, self-protective cohort in middle age, chronically embarrassed, at once afraid of and desperate for sensation. Perhaps this is solely a metropolitan trait. Let’s say it is.