🔗 Share this article

Within Erin Somers’s The Ten Year Affair, the story centers on a millennial mother named Cora, a millennial mother who craves a bygone kind of passion from a bygone kind of man. Unfortunately for her, morality in 2015 is rigid and cynical, so rather than embarking on the affair, Cora spends a full decade overthinking it, daydreaming of it and discussing it with the object of her desire, Sam – a playgroup dad who holds the title “head narrative architect” at a mortgage start-up. The book presents 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 our entire generation deserves: an energetic, clever critique of insufferable hand-wringers who’ve somehow spoiled intimacy itself.

A Portrait of Smug Unhappiness

Cora and her husband Eliot are smug, overeducated Brooklynites who, as costs increased and their family expanded, have relocated with hesitation upstate. Trapped by the “gruelling all-the-time-ness” of parenthood, they have 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 other smug, overeducated Brooklynites who have fled the city to sip craft cocktails 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 intellectually lofty and utterly unaware. He snacks casually as she scrubs the oven and states he has no desire to own her. Cora imagines them attempting to endure with Eliot in the woods, doing laundry by hand while he forages for mushrooms. She deeply desires excitement, some moral abandon, a partner who will plead, and adore, and “growl at the feet of the woman’s excellence”.

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

The Problem of High-Minded Longing

The trouble 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 claims, but in truth, about all aspects of life). What she feels for Sam are “tepid, barely beyond simple fondness”. She wants “to get fucked into the astral plane and not think about her life for a second”. But, for years, Sam refuses while Cora pines. She constructs an alternate timeline running concurrent to her actual existence, where in place of chores and errands, she has sex and hotels and Sam. When her fictional romance fizzles, her mind conjures “a Gallic character called Baptiste” who joins Sam in assisting her from the tub, “leaving her with no duties, no tasks, no obligations, other than to be revered as a youthful bride, who’d died improbably of TB”.

A Sad Climax and Deeper Themes

When they finally do give in to their desires, the sex is sad, without much play or complicity. It isn’t the sepia-toned romance she fantasized about for a full decade. 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 desires to inhabit a James Salter novel, where sex is sordid and confusing, where the power dynamics are unequal, and everyone misbehaves, and nobody keeps score.

Throughout the novel the root of Cora’s problem: she possesses a sharp tongue, but so little joy. Regarding an intimate picture from Sam, Cora complains, “he has clenched his abs and made sure he was hard, but has not cleared the frame of Crocs”. Given that the catalyst that diminished their pleasure was parenthood, one worries about the impact these flawed adults have on their kids. When Cora’s daughter asks about sex, the parents stumble. They begin with procreation then concede that sex serves other purposes. Eliot mentions a penis then admits it is not essential. Ultimately, he settles for, “you're aware of private parts?”

Beneath the story flows a quiet theme of common existential queries of midlife: do our lives have meaning? What follows our final breath? These themes are more explicit in Cora's internal dialogues. Considering these passages, the reader may ponder what lesson Cora and her cynical lot would derive from their unsatisfying escapades. Would Cora grow more open to life’s flawed pleasures, its sentimental delights? When Eliot asks about her affair during an audio program on bondage, Cora reflects “all meaningful communication is compromised by specific context”. Others could argue it's enriched. Yet that is not her nature, and Somers doesn’t give the protagonist easy revelations, or stretch her where she is unable to go.

A Final Assessment

This is an incisive, uproariously funny, exquisitely detailed novel, written with such withering exactitude. It is profoundly self-aware, spare and brimming with subtext: a depiction of a worried, self-protective cohort entering midlife, chronically embarrassed, simultaneously terrified of and hungry for intense experience. Or maybe that’s just the New Yorkers. For the sake of argument, we'll assume so.