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Within Erin Somers’s The Ten Year Affair, we meet a millennial mother named Cora, a millennial mother who desperately wants a bygone kind of passion from a bygone kind of man. Unfortunately for her, morality in 2015 is inflexible and jaded, so rather than embarking on the affair, Cora devotes a full decade obsessively analyzing it, fantasising about it and talking it over with the object of her desire, Sam – a playgroup dad who works as “chief storytelling officer” at a mortgage start-up. This novel presents itself as a humorous twist on the classic adultery novel and a send-up of a particular, self-aware clique of economically slipping New Yorkers. It stands as the definitive narrative of middle-aged unfaithfulness this current cohort has coming: a propulsive, witty takedown of insufferable hand-wringers who’ve managed to ruin even sex.

A Portrait of Smug Unhappiness

Cora and her husband Eliot are smug, overeducated Brooklynites who, with rents rising and children growing, have moved reluctantly upstate. Trapped by the “gruelling all-the-time-ness” of raising children, they juggle office careers, two children, and an ongoing fungal issue proliferating beneath their bathroom tiles that they lack the energy and money to sort out. They spend time with other smug, overeducated Brooklynites who have escaped the metropolis to drink negronis out of mason jars and critique one another closer to nature. Yet Cora's isolation in this new environment, it stems not from her own critical, joyless perspective but because her suburban peers are “boring and self-absorbed, even more so than in their previous urban life”.

Eliot is intellectually lofty and utterly unaware. He eats popcorn as she scrubs the oven 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 forages for mushrooms. She longs for excitement, some moral abandon, a partner who will beg, and adore, and “growl at the feet of the woman’s excellence”.

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

The Problem of High-Minded Longing

The trouble 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). Her feelings for Sam are “bland, liking-adjacent”. She wants “a transcendent physical experience and not think about her life for a second”. But, for years, Sam refuses while Cora pines. She imagines an alternate timeline 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 French guy named Baptiste” who joins Sam in assisting her from the tub, “leaving her with no duties, no tasks, no requirements, other than to be revered like someone’s teenage wife, who’d died improbably of TB”.

A Sad Climax and Undercurrents

When they finally do give in to temptation, the sex is sad, lacking in fun or mutual connection. It isn’t the nostalgically perfect affair she fantasized about for 10 years. Cora puts on an alluring gown and Sam “performs oral sex with grim determination in their hotel room” before dinner. One imagines that Cora wants to slip inside a James Salter novel, where intimacy is messy and ambiguous, where the power dynamics are unequal, and everyone misbehaves, and nobody keeps score.

Somers consistently suggests the root of Cora’s problem: she has such cutting wit, 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 failed to remove his casual footwear from the shot”. Since the event that killed their fun was parenthood, one worries about the impact these flawed adults have on their kids. When Cora’s daughter asks about sex, the adults fumble. They begin with procreation then acknowledge that sex serves other purposes. The father references male anatomy then concedes that one isn’t required. Ultimately, he settles for, “you're aware of private parts?”

Beneath the story flows a quiet theme of familiar middle-age questions: do our lives have meaning? What follows our final breath? These themes are more explicit in Cora’s imagined conversations. Considering these passages, the reader may ponder what moral Cora and her cynical lot would derive from their unsatisfying escapades. Might Cora become more open to life’s flawed pleasures, its corny pleasures? When Eliot asks about her affair in the middle of a podcast about rope, Cora thinks “all meaningful communication is undermined by its particulars”. Others could argue it's enriched. But that’s not Cora, and Somers doesn’t give her character false epiphanies, or force growth beyond her capacity.

An Ultimate Appraisal

This is an incisive, uproariously funny, finely observed novel, written with devastating precision. It is absolutely aware of itself, economical yet rich with implication: a depiction of an anxious, loin-girding generation in middle age, 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.