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Within the novel by Erin Somers The Ten Year Affair, we meet a millennial mother named Cora, a woman in her prime who craves a type of romance from another era from a man of a different time. Sadly, for Cora, the modern ethical landscape is inflexible and jaded, and instead of having the affair, Cora devotes 10 years overthinking it, daydreaming of it and discussing it with the object of her desire, Sam – a father from her child's circle who works as “chief storytelling officer” at a mortgage start-up. 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. One could call it the midlife adultery story this current cohort deserves: an energetic, clever critique of unbearably anxious individuals who’ve somehow spoiled intimacy itself.

A Portrait of Self-Satisfied Unhappiness

Cora and her husband Eliot are highly educated, somewhat arrogant former city dwellers who, as costs increased and their family expanded, have relocated with hesitation to the suburbs. Caught in the “gruelling all-the-time-ness” of parenthood, they juggle office careers, two children, and a persistent mushroom growing under 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 sip craft cocktails from rustic glassware and critique one another closer to nature. Yet Cora's isolation here, it stems not from her fussy, lifeless lens but because her new neighbours are “boring and self-absorbed, duller and vainer than they were back in the city”.

Eliot is intellectually lofty and utterly unaware. He eats popcorn as she scrubs the oven and states he has no desire to own her. Cora imagines herself trying to survive a rustic life together, doing laundry by hand while he forages for mushrooms. She deeply desires drama, a bit of depravity, a partner who will beg, 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 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. She finds it "an overwhelming request to feel fervor" (about work, she claims, but in truth, about all aspects of life). Her feelings for Sam are “bland, liking-adjacent”. She craves “to get fucked into the astral plane and not think about her life for a second”. But, for years, Sam demurs while Cora pines. She imagines a parallel reality running concurrent to her actual existence, 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 joins Sam in helping her out of the bath, “leaving her with no duties, no responsibilities, no obligations, other than to be revered as a youthful bride, tragically lost to illness”.

A Sad Climax and Undercurrents

When they finally do give in to their desires, their intimacy is melancholy, lacking in fun or mutual connection. It isn’t the sepia-toned romance she fantasized about for a full decade. Cora puts on a slinky dress and Sam “performs oral sex with grim determination in their hotel room” before dinner. The reader senses that Cora desires to slip inside 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.

Somers consistently suggests the core issue for Cora: 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. As her daughter inquires about sex, the adults fumble. They begin with procreation then acknowledge that sex isn’t always about babies. The father references male anatomy then admits it is not essential. Ultimately, he settles for, “you know genitals?”

Underpinning the narrative runs the subtle undercurrent of common existential queries of midlife: is there purpose to our existence? Where do we go after death? These themes are more explicit in Cora’s imagined conversations. Reading these exchanges, one wonders 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 “every serious exchange is compromised by specific context”. Others could argue it's enriched. But that’s not Cora, and the author refuses to grant the protagonist easy revelations, or force growth beyond her capacity.

An Ultimate Assessment

This is an incisive, hilarious, exquisitely detailed novel, crafted 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, at once afraid of and desperate for sensation. Perhaps this is solely a metropolitan trait. Let’s say it is.