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Within the novel by Erin Somers The Ten Year Affair, the story centers on Cora, a woman in her prime who desperately wants a type of romance from another era 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 overthinking it, fantasising about it and talking it over with her potential lover, Sam – a playgroup dad who works as “chief storytelling officer” at a mortgage start-up. This novel presents itself as a comic take on the traditional tale of infidelity and a sharp satire of a particular, self-aware clique of downwardly mobile New Yorkers. It stands as the midlife adultery story this current cohort has coming: a propulsive, witty takedown of insufferable hand-wringers who’ve managed to ruin even sex.

A Portrait of Self-Satisfied Unhappiness

Cora and her husband 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 raising children, they juggle office careers, two children, and an ongoing fungal issue growing under their bathroom tiles that they lack the energy and money to sort out. They spend time with similarly minded urban exiles who have escaped the metropolis to drink negronis 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 “boring and self-absorbed, duller and vainer than they were back in the city”.

Eliot is high-minded and oblivious. He eats popcorn while she cleans vigorously and states he has no desire to own her. In her mind, Cora pictures herself trying to survive a rustic life together, doing laundry by hand while he forages for mushrooms. She deeply desires drama, some moral abandon, a lover who will beg, and adore, and “growl at the feet of the woman’s excellence”.

"The mundane grind of everyday existence, one must acknowledge its relentless predictability."

The Trouble with Over-Intellectualized Longing

The central conflict is that she’s as high-minded and rigid as Eliot, and unable to surrender to primal passion. She finds it "an overwhelming request to feel fervor" (about work, she says, but really about everything). Her feelings for Sam are “tepid, barely beyond simple fondness”. She craves “to get fucked into the astral plane and escape her own reality momentarily”. But, for years, Sam refuses while Cora languishes. 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 joins 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, 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 isn’t the sepia-toned romance she dreamed up for a full decade. Cora puts on a slinky dress and Sam “stoically eat[s] her out within their rented space” prior to a meal. One imagines that Cora desires to inhabit a James Salter novel, where intimacy is messy and ambiguous, where the power dynamics are unequal, and characters act out, and nobody keeps score.

Throughout the novel the root of Cora’s problem: she has such cutting wit, 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 killed their fun 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 serves other purposes. Eliot mentions a penis then concedes that one isn’t required. Finally, he lands on, “you know genitals?”

Underpinning the narrative flows a quiet theme of familiar middle-age questions: do our lives have meaning? Where do we go after death? These ideas are more explicit in Cora's internal dialogues. Reading these exchanges, one wonders what moral Cora and her jaded circle would take from their disappointing dramas. Would Cora grow more receptive of life’s flawed pleasures, its sentimental delights? When Eliot asks about her affair in the middle of a podcast about rope, Cora reflects “all meaningful communication is compromised by specific context”. Others could argue it's enriched. Yet that is not her nature, and the author refuses to grant the protagonist easy revelations, or force growth beyond her capacity.

A Final Assessment

The result is an incisive, hilarious, exquisitely detailed novel, written with devastating precision. It is profoundly self-aware, economical yet rich with implication: a portrait of a worried, self-protective cohort entering midlife, perpetually self-conscious, simultaneously terrified of and hungry for intense experience. Perhaps this is solely a metropolitan trait. Let’s say it is.