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Within Erin Somers’s The Ten Year Affair, we meet Cora, a woman in her prime who yearns for a bygone kind of passion with a man of a different time. Unfortunately for her, the modern ethical landscape is inflexible and jaded, so rather than embarking on the affair, Cora spends 10 years obsessively analyzing it, daydreaming of it and talking it over with the object of her desire, Sam – a playgroup dad who works as “head narrative architect” at a fintech company. The book presents itself as a comic take on the classic adultery novel and a send-up of a narrow, self-conscious group of economically slipping New Yorkers. One could call it the midlife adultery story this current cohort has coming: an energetic, clever critique of insufferable hand-wringers who’ve somehow spoiled even sex.

Depicting Smug Unhappiness

The central couple, Cora and Eliot are smug, overeducated Brooklynites who, as costs increased and their family expanded, have relocated with hesitation to the suburbs. Caught in the “exhausting constant demands” of parenthood, they juggle office careers, a pair of kids, and an ongoing fungal issue growing under their bathroom tiles which they cannot afford or muster the will to fix. Their social circle other smug, overeducated Brooklynites who have escaped the metropolis to drink negronis from rustic glassware and critique one another amidst a more rural setting. But if Cora is lonely in this new environment, it’s not because her own critical, joyless perspective but because her new neighbours are “boring and self-absorbed, even more so than in their previous urban life”.

Her husband Eliot remains 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 them attempting to endure with Eliot in the woods, washing clothes on a stone while he searches for chanterelles. She longs for drama, a bit of depravity, a partner who will beg, and worship, and “express raw admiration for her prowess”.

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

The Trouble with High-Minded Longing

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). What she feels for Sam are “bland, liking-adjacent”. She craves “to get fucked into the astral plane and escape her own reality momentarily”. But, for years, Sam refuses 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. When her fictional romance fizzles, 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 tasks, no obligations, except to be worshipped like someone’s teenage wife, tragically lost to illness”.

A Sad Climax and Deeper Themes

When they eventually succumb to their desires, 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 dons an alluring gown and Sam “performs oral sex with grim determination within their rented space” before dinner. The reader senses 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 core issue for Cora: she possesses a sharp tongue, but so little joy. Regarding an intimate picture from Sam, Cora complains, “he has clenched his abs and ensured he was aroused, but has not cleared the frame of Crocs”. Since the event that diminished their pleasure was having children, one worries 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 isn’t always about babies. The father references male anatomy then concedes that one isn’t required. Ultimately, he settles for, “you know genitals?”

Underpinning the narrative runs the subtle undercurrent of common existential queries of midlife: do our lives have meaning? What follows our final breath? These themes are more explicit in Cora’s imagined conversations. Considering these passages, one wonders what lesson Cora and her jaded circle would derive from their unsatisfying escapades. Would Cora grow more open to 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”. 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.

An Ultimate Appraisal

This is an incisive, uproariously funny, finely observed novel, crafted with devastating precision. It is profoundly self-aware, spare and brimming with subtext: a depiction 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.