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In the novel by Erin Somers The Ten Year Affair, we meet a millennial mother named Cora, a millennial mother who yearns for a type of romance from another era with a man of a different time. Sadly, for Cora, morality in 2015 is inflexible and jaded, so rather than embarking on the affair, Cora spends a full decade overthinking it, fantasising about it and discussing it with her potential lover, Sam – a father from her child's circle who holds the title “chief storytelling officer” at a fintech company. 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 downwardly mobile New Yorkers. One could call it 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 even sex.

Depicting Smug Discontent

The central couple, Cora and Eliot are smug, overeducated Brooklynites who, as costs increased and their family expanded, have relocated with hesitation upstate. Trapped by the “exhausting constant demands” of parenthood, they juggle desk jobs, a pair of kids, and a persistent mushroom growing under their bathroom tiles that they lack the energy and money to sort out. Their social circle similarly minded urban exiles who have escaped the metropolis to drink negronis out of mason jars and critique one another closer to nature. Yet Cora's isolation here, it stems not from her own critical, joyless perspective but because her suburban peers are “boring and self-absorbed, duller and vainer than they were back in the city”.

Eliot is 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 herself trying to survive with Eliot in the woods, washing clothes on a stone while he forages for mushrooms. She deeply desires drama, a bit of depravity, a lover who will plead, and adore, and “express raw admiration for her prowess”.

"The mundane grind of everyday existence, you had to admire its consistency."

The Trouble with Over-Intellectualized Desire

The trouble is that she’s as high-minded and rigid as Eliot, and unable to surrender to primal passion. She finds it "an overwhelming request to feel fervor" (about work, she claims, but really about everything). Her feelings for Sam are “tepid, barely beyond simple fondness”. She craves “a transcendent physical experience and escape her own reality momentarily”. But, for years, Sam demurs while Cora languishes. 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 tasks, no requirements, other than to be revered like someone’s teenage wife, tragically lost to illness”.

A Sad Conclusion and Deeper Themes

When they eventually succumb to their desires, the sex is sad, lacking in fun or mutual connection. It isn’t the sepia-toned romance she dreamed up for 10 years. Cora dons a slinky dress and Sam “stoically eat[s] her out in their hotel room” prior to a meal. One imagines that Cora wants to slip inside a James Salter novel, where sex is sordid and confusing, where the power dynamics are unequal, and everyone misbehaves, and nobody keeps score.

Somers consistently suggests the root of Cora’s problem: she possesses a sharp tongue, but a profound lack of happiness. Regarding an intimate picture from Sam, Cora complains, “he tightened his stomach 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 the impact these flawed adults have on their kids. When Cora’s daughter asks about sex, the adults fumble. They begin with procreation then concede that sex isn’t always about babies. The father references male anatomy then admits it is not essential. Finally, he lands on, “you're aware of private parts?”

Beneath the story runs the subtle undercurrent of familiar middle-age questions: is there purpose to our existence? What follows our final breath? These ideas are more explicit in Cora’s imagined conversations. Reading these exchanges, the reader may ponder what moral Cora and her jaded circle would derive from their disappointing dramas. Might Cora become more open to life’s flawed pleasures, its sentimental delights? When Eliot asks about her affair in the middle of a podcast about rope, Cora thinks “every serious exchange is compromised by specific context”. Others could argue it's enriched. But that’s not Cora, and Somers doesn’t give her character false epiphanies, or stretch her where she is unable to go.

An Ultimate Assessment

The result is a razor-sharp, hilarious, exquisitely detailed novel, crafted with such withering exactitude. It is profoundly self-aware, spare and brimming with subtext: a portrait of a worried, self-protective cohort entering midlife, chronically embarrassed, simultaneously terrified of and hungry for intense experience. Perhaps this is solely a metropolitan trait. For the sake of argument, we'll assume so.