🔗 Share this article

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 desperately wants a type of romance from another era with a bygone kind of man. Unfortunately for her, the modern ethical landscape is inflexible and jaded, so rather than embarking on the affair, Cora spends 10 years 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 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: a propulsive, witty takedown of insufferable hand-wringers who’ve somehow spoiled even sex.

Depicting Self-Satisfied Discontent

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. Trapped by the “gruelling all-the-time-ness” of parenthood, they juggle desk jobs, a pair of kids, and a persistent mushroom proliferating beneath their bathroom tiles which they cannot afford or muster the will to fix. They spend time with other smug, overeducated Brooklynites who have fled the city to drink negronis out of mason jars and critique one another amidst a more rural setting. Yet Cora's isolation here, it’s not because her fussy, lifeless lens 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 snacks casually while she cleans vigorously and states he has no desire to own her. Cora imagines herself trying to survive with Eliot in the woods, washing clothes on a stone while he forages for mushrooms. 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, 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 unable to surrender to primal passion. It’s “too much to ask her to be passionate” (regarding her career, she says, but really about everything). Her feelings 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 refuses while Cora languishes. 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, her mind conjures “a French guy named Baptiste” who teams up with Sam in assisting her from the tub, “nothing for her to do, no responsibilities, no requirements, other than to be revered as a youthful bride, tragically lost to illness”.

A Sad Conclusion and Undercurrents

When they finally do give in to temptation, the sex is sad, without much play or complicity. It fails to be the nostalgically perfect affair she dreamed up for a full decade. Cora puts on a slinky dress and Sam “performs oral sex with grim determination in their hotel room” before dinner. One imagines that Cora desires to inhabit a James Salter novel, where sex is sordid and confusing, where imbalances of control exist, and characters act out, and nobody keeps score.

Throughout the novel the root of Cora’s problem: she has such cutting wit, but a profound lack of happiness. Regarding an intimate picture from Sam, Cora critiques, “he tightened his stomach and ensured he was aroused, but has not cleared the frame of Crocs”. Given that the catalyst that killed their fun was parenthood, readers may fret 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 acknowledge that sex serves other purposes. Eliot mentions a penis then admits it is not essential. Ultimately, he settles for, “you know genitals?”

Beneath the story flows a quiet theme of familiar middle-age questions: is there purpose to our existence? Where do we go after death? These themes are more directly explored in Cora's internal dialogues. Considering these passages, the reader may ponder what moral Cora and her jaded circle would derive 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 during an audio program on bondage, Cora thinks “every serious exchange is compromised by specific context”. Some might say enhanced. But that’s not Cora, and the author refuses to grant the protagonist easy revelations, or force growth beyond her capacity.

An Ultimate Assessment

The result is a razor-sharp, uproariously funny, exquisitely detailed novel, written with devastating precision. It is absolutely aware of itself, spare and brimming with subtext: a portrait of an anxious, loin-girding generation entering midlife, chronically embarrassed, simultaneously terrified of and hungry for intense experience. Perhaps this is solely a metropolitan trait. For the sake of argument, we'll assume so.