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Within the novel by Erin Somers The Ten Year Affair, we meet Cora, a woman in her prime who yearns for a bygone kind of passion from a man of a different time. Sadly, for Cora, the modern ethical landscape is inflexible and jaded, so rather than embarking on the affair, Cora spends a full decade obsessively analyzing it, fantasising about it and talking it over with her potential lover, Sam – a father from her child's circle who holds the title “head narrative architect” at a fintech company. This novel presents itself as a humorous twist on the traditional tale of infidelity and a send-up of a particular, self-aware clique of downwardly mobile New Yorkers. It stands as the midlife adultery story this current cohort deserves: a propulsive, witty takedown of insufferable hand-wringers who’ve somehow spoiled intimacy itself.

A Portrait of Self-Satisfied Discontent

The central couple, Cora and Eliot are highly educated, somewhat arrogant former city dwellers who, with rents rising and children growing, have relocated with hesitation upstate. Trapped by the “exhausting constant demands” of raising children, they have desk jobs, two children, and a persistent mushroom growing under their bathroom tiles which they cannot afford or muster the will to fix. Their social circle other smug, overeducated Brooklynites who have fled the city to drink negronis from rustic glassware and judge each other closer to nature. Yet Cora's isolation in this new environment, it’s not because her fussy, lifeless lens but because her new neighbours 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 as she scrubs the oven and says he doesn’t wish to possess her. In her mind, Cora pictures them attempting to endure a rustic life together, doing laundry by hand while he forages for mushrooms. She longs for drama, some moral abandon, a partner who will beg, and worship, 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 Cora is just as intellectually constrained as her husband, and incapable of that kind of abandon herself. She finds it "an overwhelming request to feel fervor" (about work, she claims, but really about everything). What she feels for Sam are “tepid, barely beyond simple fondness”. She craves “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 a parallel reality running concurrent to her actual existence, where instead of bills and school pickups, she has passion, luxury, and her imagined lover. As this fantasy dims, 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 responsibilities, no obligations, except to be worshipped like someone’s teenage wife, who’d died improbably of TB”.

A Sad Climax and Deeper Themes

When they eventually succumb to their desires, the sex is sad, lacking in fun or mutual connection. It isn’t the nostalgically perfect affair she dreamed up for a full decade. Cora puts on an alluring gown and Sam “performs oral sex with grim determination within their rented space” before dinner. One imagines that Cora wants to inhabit a James Salter novel, where sex is sordid and confusing, where imbalances of control exist, and characters act out, and no one tallies the cost.

Throughout the novel the core issue for Cora: 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 ensured he was aroused, but has not cleared the frame of Crocs”. Given that the catalyst 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 parents stumble. They start with babies 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?”

Underpinning the narrative runs the subtle undercurrent of familiar middle-age questions: do our lives have meaning? What follows our final breath? These ideas are more explicit in Cora's internal dialogues. Reading these exchanges, the reader may ponder what moral Cora and her jaded circle would take from their disappointing dramas. Would Cora grow more receptive of life’s imperfect joys, its sentimental delights? When Eliot asks about her affair in the middle of a podcast about rope, Cora reflects “all meaningful communication is undermined by its particulars”. Some might say enhanced. But that’s not Cora, and the author refuses to grant her character false epiphanies, or force growth beyond her capacity.

A Final Assessment

The result is a razor-sharp, uproariously funny, exquisitely detailed novel, written with devastating precision. It is profoundly self-aware, spare and brimming with subtext: a portrait of an anxious, loin-girding generation entering midlife, chronically embarrassed, simultaneously terrified of and hungry for intense experience. Perhaps this is solely a metropolitan trait. Let’s say it is.