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In Erin Somers’s The Ten Year Affair, we meet Cora, a woman in her prime who desperately wants a bygone kind of passion with a man of a different time. Unfortunately for her, morality in 2015 is rigid and cynical, and instead of having the affair, Cora devotes a full decade obsessively analyzing 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. The book positions itself as a comic take on the traditional tale of infidelity and a sharp satire of a particular, self-aware clique of downwardly mobile New Yorkers. One could call it the definitive narrative of middle-aged unfaithfulness this current cohort deserves: a propulsive, witty takedown of insufferable hand-wringers who’ve somehow spoiled intimacy itself.

A Portrait of Self-Satisfied Unhappiness

The central couple, Cora and Eliot are highly educated, somewhat arrogant former city dwellers who, as costs increased and their family expanded, have relocated with hesitation to the suburbs. Trapped by 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 out of mason jars and critique one another closer to nature. Yet Cora's isolation in this new environment, it’s not because her own critical, joyless perspective but because her new neighbours are “dull and vain, duller and vainer than they were back in the city”.

Eliot is intellectually lofty and utterly unaware. He snacks casually while she cleans vigorously and states he has no desire to own her. Cora imagines them attempting to endure with Eliot in the woods, washing clothes on a stone while he searches for chanterelles. She deeply desires drama, some moral abandon, a lover who will beg, and worship, and “growl at the feet of the woman’s excellence”.

"The shabbiness of real life, you had to admire its consistency."

The Problem of High-Minded 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" (regarding her career, she claims, but really about everything). Her feelings for Sam are “bland, liking-adjacent”. She wants “to get fucked into the astral plane and escape her own reality momentarily”. But, for years, Sam refuses while Cora pines. She imagines a parallel reality alongside her real life, 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 joins Sam in helping her out of the bath, “nothing for her to do, no responsibilities, no obligations, other than to be revered like someone’s teenage wife, tragically lost to illness”.

A Disappointing Climax and Deeper Themes

When they eventually succumb to their desires, their intimacy is melancholy, lacking in fun or mutual connection. It fails to be the nostalgically perfect affair she fantasized about for a full decade. Cora puts on an alluring gown and Sam “performs oral sex with grim determination in their hotel room” before dinner. The reader senses that Cora wants to inhabit a certain type of literary world, where sex is sordid and confusing, where imbalances of control exist, and everyone misbehaves, and no one tallies the cost.

Throughout the novel 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 has clenched his abs and ensured he was aroused, but has not cleared the frame of Crocs”. Given that the catalyst that diminished their pleasure was having children, readers may fret about the impact these flawed adults have on their kids. When Cora’s daughter asks about sex, the parents stumble. They begin with procreation then concede that sex isn’t always about babies. Eliot mentions a penis then admits it is not essential. Finally, he lands on, “you're aware of private parts?”

Underpinning the narrative flows a quiet theme of familiar middle-age questions: do our lives have meaning? What follows our final breath? These themes are more directly explored in Cora's internal dialogues. Considering these passages, one wonders what lesson Cora and her cynical lot would take from their disappointing dramas. Would Cora grow more open to life’s imperfect joys, its sentimental delights? Upon being questioned by Eliot about her affair in the middle of a podcast about rope, Cora thinks “all meaningful communication is compromised by specific context”. Some might say enhanced. Yet that is not her nature, and the author refuses to grant her character false epiphanies, or stretch her where she is unable to go.

A Final Appraisal

The result is a razor-sharp, hilarious, exquisitely detailed novel, written with devastating precision. It is profoundly self-aware, economical yet rich with implication: a depiction of a worried, self-protective cohort in middle age, chronically embarrassed, at once afraid of and desperate for sensation. Perhaps this is solely a metropolitan trait. For the sake of argument, we'll assume so.