🔗 Share this article

Within Erin Somers’s The Ten Year Affair, we meet Cora, a woman in her prime who desperately wants a type of romance from another era with a bygone kind of man. Sadly, for Cora, 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 her potential lover, Sam – a playgroup dad who holds the title “head narrative architect” at a fintech company. This novel presents itself as a comic take on the classic adultery novel and a send-up of a narrow, self-conscious group of downwardly mobile New Yorkers. It stands as the definitive narrative of middle-aged unfaithfulness our entire generation deserves: an energetic, clever critique of unbearably anxious individuals who’ve managed to ruin even sex.

Depicting Smug 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. Trapped by the “gruelling all-the-time-ness” of parenthood, they juggle desk jobs, two children, and a persistent mushroom growing under their bathroom tiles which they cannot afford or muster the will to fix. They spend time with other smug, overeducated Brooklynites who have escaped the metropolis to drink negronis out of mason jars and judge each other 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, duller and vainer than they were back in the city”.

Eliot is intellectually lofty and utterly unaware. He eats popcorn while she cleans vigorously and says he doesn’t wish to possess her. In her mind, Cora pictures them attempting to endure with Eliot in the woods, washing clothes on a stone while he searches for chanterelles. She longs for excitement, a bit of depravity, a lover who will beg, and worship, and “express raw admiration for her prowess”.

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

The Trouble with High-Minded Longing

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 in truth, about all aspects of life). Her feelings for Sam are “tepid, barely beyond simple fondness”. She craves “a transcendent physical experience and escape her own reality momentarily”. Yet, for a decade, Sam demurs while Cora languishes. She imagines an alternate timeline 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, she imagines “a French guy named Baptiste” who joins Sam in assisting her from the tub, “leaving her with no duties, no responsibilities, no obligations, other than to be revered like someone’s teenage wife, who’d died improbably of TB”.

A Sad Conclusion and Deeper Themes

When they finally do give in to their desires, the sex is sad, without much play or complicity. It fails to be the sepia-toned romance she dreamed up for a full decade. Cora puts on an alluring gown and Sam “stoically eat[s] her out within their rented space” before dinner. The reader senses that Cora desires to slip inside a certain type of literary world, where sex is sordid and confusing, where the power dynamics are unequal, and characters act out, and no one tallies the cost.

Throughout the novel the core issue for Cora: she has such cutting wit, but a profound lack of happiness. Regarding an intimate picture from Sam, Cora complains, “he tightened his stomach and ensured he was aroused, but failed to remove his casual footwear from the shot”. Given that the catalyst that killed their fun was having children, readers may fret about the impact these flawed adults have on their kids. As her daughter inquires about sex, the parents stumble. They start with babies then acknowledge that sex isn’t always about babies. The father references male anatomy then admits it is not essential. Finally, he lands on, “you know genitals?”

Beneath the story runs the subtle undercurrent of common existential queries of midlife: do our lives have meaning? Where do we go after death? These ideas are more explicit in Cora’s imagined conversations. Considering these passages, the reader may ponder what lesson Cora and her jaded circle would take from their unsatisfying escapades. Might Cora become more open to life’s imperfect joys, its sentimental delights? When Eliot asks about her affair during an audio program on bondage, Cora reflects “all meaningful communication is undermined by its particulars”. Some might say enhanced. Yet that is not her nature, and Somers doesn’t give the protagonist easy revelations, or stretch her where she is unable to go.

An Ultimate Assessment

This is a razor-sharp, hilarious, exquisitely detailed novel, written with such withering exactitude. It is absolutely aware of itself, spare and brimming with subtext: a portrait of an anxious, loin-girding generation entering midlife, perpetually self-conscious, simultaneously terrified of and hungry for intense experience. Perhaps this is solely a metropolitan trait. Let’s say it is.