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In the novel by Erin Somers The Ten Year Affair, we meet Cora, a woman in her prime who craves a type of romance from another era with a bygone kind of man. Sadly, for Cora, the modern ethical landscape is inflexible and jaded, and instead of having the affair, Cora devotes a full decade 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 mortgage start-up. The book positions itself as a humorous twist on the traditional tale of infidelity and a sharp satire of a narrow, self-conscious group of economically slipping New Yorkers. One could call it the definitive narrative of middle-aged unfaithfulness this current cohort deserves: an energetic, clever critique of unbearably anxious individuals who’ve managed to ruin intimacy itself.

Depicting Smug Discontent

Cora and her husband Eliot are smug, overeducated Brooklynites who, with rents rising and children growing, have relocated with hesitation to the suburbs. Trapped by the “gruelling all-the-time-ness” of raising children, they juggle desk jobs, two children, and an ongoing fungal issue growing under 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 sip craft cocktails 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 “dull and vain, duller and vainer than they were back in the city”.

Eliot is high-minded and oblivious. He eats popcorn while she cleans vigorously and says he doesn’t wish to possess her. Cora imagines them attempting to endure a rustic life together, washing clothes on a stone while he searches for chanterelles. She deeply desires drama, some moral abandon, a partner who will plead, and adore, and “express raw admiration for her prowess”.

"The mundane grind of everyday existence, you had to admire its consistency."

The Trouble with High-Minded Longing

The central conflict is that she’s as high-minded and rigid as Eliot, and incapable of that kind of abandon herself. 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 “tepid, barely beyond simple fondness”. She craves “a transcendent physical experience and escape her own reality momentarily”. But, for years, Sam demurs 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. When her fictional romance fizzles, her mind conjures “a Gallic character called Baptiste” who teams up with Sam in helping her out of the bath, “leaving her with no duties, no responsibilities, no requirements, other than to be revered as a youthful bride, tragically lost to illness”.

A Disappointing Climax and Undercurrents

When they finally do give in to their desires, the sex is sad, without much play or complicity. It isn’t the nostalgically perfect affair she fantasized about for 10 years. Cora dons a slinky dress and Sam “stoically eat[s] her out within their rented space” prior to a meal. The reader senses that Cora wants to inhabit a James Salter novel, where intimacy is messy and ambiguous, where imbalances of control exist, and characters act out, and no one tallies the cost.

Throughout the novel the root of Cora’s problem: she possesses a sharp tongue, but a profound lack of happiness. Regarding an intimate picture from Sam, Cora critiques, “he has clenched his abs and made sure he was hard, 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 serves other purposes. Eliot mentions a penis then admits it is not essential. Finally, he lands on, “you know genitals?”

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 themes are more directly explored in Cora’s imagined conversations. Considering these passages, one wonders what moral Cora and her cynical lot would take 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 in the middle of a podcast about rope, Cora reflects “every serious exchange is compromised by specific context”. Others could argue it's enriched. Yet that is not her nature, and the author refuses to grant her character false epiphanies, or stretch her where she is unable to go.

A Final Appraisal

This is an incisive, uproariously funny, finely observed novel, written with devastating precision. It is profoundly self-aware, spare and brimming with subtext: a depiction of an anxious, loin-girding generation in middle age, perpetually self-conscious, simultaneously terrified of and hungry for intense experience. Perhaps this is solely a metropolitan trait. For the sake of argument, we'll assume so.