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Within the novel by Erin Somers The Ten Year Affair, the story centers on Cora, a millennial mother who desperately wants a type of romance from another era from a man of a different time. Unfortunately for her, the modern ethical landscape is inflexible and jaded, and instead of having the affair, Cora devotes 10 years overthinking it, fantasising about it and talking it over with her potential lover, Sam – a playgroup dad who holds the title “head narrative architect” at a mortgage start-up. This novel 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. It stands as the definitive narrative of middle-aged unfaithfulness our entire generation has coming: a propulsive, witty takedown of insufferable hand-wringers who’ve managed to ruin intimacy itself.

Depicting Smug Discontent

Cora and her husband Eliot are highly educated, somewhat arrogant former city dwellers who, with rents rising and children growing, have moved reluctantly upstate. Trapped by the “gruelling all-the-time-ness” of raising children, they juggle desk jobs, a pair of kids, 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. But if Cora is lonely here, it stems not from her own critical, joyless perspective but because her suburban peers are “dull and vain, 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 says he doesn’t wish to possess her. In her mind, Cora pictures herself trying to survive a rustic life together, doing laundry by hand while he forages for mushrooms. She longs for excitement, a bit of depravity, a partner who will beg, and worship, and “express raw admiration for her prowess”.

"The shabbiness of real life, you had to admire its consistency."

The Problem of Over-Intellectualized Desire

The central conflict is that Cora is just as intellectually constrained as her husband, and incapable of that kind of abandon herself. It’s “too much to ask her to be passionate” (regarding her career, she claims, but in truth, about all aspects of life). Her feelings for Sam are “tepid, barely beyond simple fondness”. She wants “a transcendent physical experience and escape her own reality momentarily”. But, for years, Sam demurs while Cora pines. She imagines an alternate timeline running concurrent to her actual existence, where in place of chores and errands, she has passion, luxury, and her imagined lover. As this fantasy dims, she imagines “a Gallic character called Baptiste” who joins Sam in assisting her from the tub, “leaving her with no duties, no tasks, no requirements, except to be worshipped as a youthful bride, tragically lost to illness”.

A Sad Climax and Deeper Themes

When they finally do give in to temptation, their intimacy is melancholy, lacking in fun or mutual connection. It fails to be the nostalgically perfect affair 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. One imagines that Cora desires to inhabit a James Salter novel, where intimacy is messy and ambiguous, where imbalances of control exist, and characters act out, and nobody keeps score.

Throughout the novel the core issue for Cora: she has such cutting wit, but so little joy. Of Sam’s erotic photo, Cora critiques, “he has clenched his abs 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 what these idiots are doing to their children. 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 concedes that one isn’t required. Ultimately, he settles for, “you know genitals?”

Underpinning the narrative flows a quiet theme of common existential queries of midlife: 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 lesson Cora and her jaded circle would derive from their disappointing dramas. Would Cora grow more receptive of life’s flawed pleasures, its sentimental delights? Upon being questioned by Eliot about her affair during an audio program on bondage, Cora reflects “every serious exchange is compromised by specific context”. Some might say enhanced. But that’s not Cora, and Somers doesn’t give her character false epiphanies, or stretch her where she is unable to go.

A Final Appraisal

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 depiction of an anxious, loin-girding generation in middle age, chronically embarrassed, at once afraid of and desperate for sensation. Or maybe that’s just the New Yorkers. Let’s say it is.