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Within Erin Somers’s The Ten Year Affair, the story centers on a millennial mother named Cora, a woman in her prime who yearns for a type of romance from another era with a bygone kind of man. Sadly, for Cora, the modern ethical landscape is rigid and cynical, so rather than embarking on the affair, Cora devotes 10 years obsessively analyzing it, fantasising about it and discussing it with the object of her desire, Sam – a playgroup dad who works as “head narrative architect” at a fintech company. The book positions itself as a comic take on the traditional tale of infidelity and a sharp satire of a narrow, self-conscious group of downwardly mobile New Yorkers. It stands as the definitive narrative of middle-aged unfaithfulness this current cohort deserves: an energetic, clever critique of insufferable hand-wringers who’ve managed to ruin intimacy itself.

Depicting Smug Unhappiness

The central couple, Cora and Eliot are smug, overeducated Brooklynites who, as costs increased and their family expanded, have relocated with hesitation to the suburbs. Caught in the “exhausting constant demands” 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 similarly minded urban exiles who have fled the city to sip craft cocktails out of mason jars and critique one another amidst a more rural setting. But if Cora is lonely in this new environment, it stems not from 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 intellectually lofty and utterly unaware. He snacks casually while she cleans vigorously and states he has no desire to own her. Cora imagines herself trying to survive with Eliot in the woods, washing clothes on a stone while he forages for mushrooms. She deeply desires excitement, a bit of depravity, a lover who will beg, and adore, and “express raw admiration for her prowess”.

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

The Trouble with Over-Intellectualized Desire

The trouble is that Cora is just as intellectually constrained as her husband, and unable to surrender to primal passion. It’s “too much to ask her to be passionate” (about work, she says, but really about everything). What she feels for Sam are “bland, liking-adjacent”. She wants “to get fucked into the astral plane and escape her own reality momentarily”. Yet, for a decade, 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 sex and hotels and Sam. When her fictional romance fizzles, her mind conjures “a French guy named Baptiste” who joins Sam in helping her out of the bath, “nothing for her to do, no responsibilities, no requirements, other than to be revered as a youthful bride, who’d died improbably of TB”.

A Disappointing Conclusion and Undercurrents

When they finally do give in to temptation, their intimacy is melancholy, lacking in fun or mutual connection. It isn’t the sepia-toned romance she dreamed up for 10 years. Cora dons an alluring gown and Sam “stoically eat[s] her out within their rented space” before dinner. The reader senses that Cora wants to slip inside a James Salter novel, where sex is sordid and confusing, where imbalances of control exist, and characters act out, and nobody keeps score.

Somers consistently suggests the core issue for Cora: she has such cutting wit, but a profound lack of happiness. Regarding an intimate picture from Sam, Cora critiques, “he tightened his stomach 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 what these idiots are doing to their children. As her daughter inquires about sex, the adults fumble. They begin with procreation then concede that sex serves other purposes. The father references male anatomy then admits it is not essential. 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 directly explored in Cora's internal dialogues. Reading these exchanges, the reader may ponder what lesson Cora and her jaded circle would take from their disappointing dramas. Would Cora grow more open to life’s flawed pleasures, its corny pleasures? Upon being questioned by Eliot about her affair during an audio program on bondage, Cora thinks “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 her character false epiphanies, or force growth beyond her capacity.

An Ultimate Appraisal

The result is a razor-sharp, hilarious, exquisitely detailed novel, written with devastating precision. It is absolutely aware of itself, spare and brimming with subtext: a portrait of an anxious, loin-girding generation entering midlife, chronically embarrassed, at once afraid of and desperate for sensation. Or maybe that’s just the New Yorkers. Let’s say it is.