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Within the novel by Erin Somers The Ten Year Affair, we meet Cora, a millennial mother who yearns for a bygone kind of passion from a man of a different time. Sadly, for Cora, morality in 2015 is rigid and cynical, so rather than embarking on the affair, Cora spends 10 years overthinking it, daydreaming of it and talking it over with the object of her desire, Sam – a father from her child's circle who holds the title “chief storytelling officer” at a fintech company. The book positions itself as a humorous twist on the traditional tale of infidelity and a sharp satire of a particular, self-aware clique of downwardly mobile New Yorkers. It stands as the definitive narrative of middle-aged unfaithfulness this current cohort has coming: an energetic, clever critique of unbearably anxious individuals who’ve managed to ruin even sex.

A Portrait of Self-Satisfied Discontent

The central couple, Cora and Eliot are smug, overeducated Brooklynites who, as costs increased and their family expanded, have moved reluctantly to the suburbs. Trapped by the “exhausting constant demands” of raising children, they have desk jobs, a pair of kids, and an ongoing fungal issue proliferating beneath their bathroom tiles which they cannot afford or muster the will to fix. Their social circle similarly minded urban exiles who have escaped the metropolis to drink negronis from rustic glassware and judge each other closer to nature. But if Cora is lonely in this new environment, it stems not from her own critical, joyless perspective but because her new neighbours are “boring and self-absorbed, even more so than in their previous urban life”.

Her husband Eliot remains 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 herself trying to survive with Eliot in the woods, doing laundry by hand while he forages for mushrooms. She longs for drama, some moral abandon, a partner who will plead, and adore, and “express raw admiration for her prowess”.

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

The Problem of High-Minded Desire

The central conflict is that Cora is just as intellectually constrained as her husband, and incapable of that kind of abandon herself. It’s “too much to ask her to be passionate” (regarding her career, she claims, but really about everything). 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”. Yet, for a decade, 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. When her fictional romance fizzles, her mind conjures “a Gallic character called Baptiste” who teams up with Sam in assisting her from the tub, “leaving her with no duties, no tasks, no requirements, other than to be revered as a youthful bride, tragically lost to illness”.

A Sad Climax and Deeper Themes

When they eventually succumb to their desires, their intimacy is melancholy, lacking in fun or mutual connection. It isn’t the nostalgically perfect affair she dreamed up for 10 years. Cora puts on an alluring gown and Sam “performs oral sex with grim determination in their hotel room” prior to a meal. 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 everyone misbehaves, and nobody keeps score.

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 made sure he was hard, but failed to remove his casual footwear from the shot”. Since the event that diminished their pleasure was parenthood, one worries about what these idiots are doing to their children. As her daughter inquires 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 common existential queries of midlife: do our lives have meaning? Where do we go after death? These themes 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 unsatisfying escapades. Might Cora become more open to life’s imperfect joys, its corny pleasures? When Eliot asks about her affair during an audio program on bondage, Cora thinks “every serious exchange is undermined by its particulars”. Some might say enhanced. Yet that is not her nature, and the author refuses to grant her character false epiphanies, or force growth beyond her capacity.

An Ultimate Assessment

This is a razor-sharp, hilarious, exquisitely detailed novel, crafted with devastating precision. It is profoundly self-aware, economical yet rich with implication: a portrait of an anxious, loin-girding generation in middle age, perpetually self-conscious, at once afraid of and desperate for sensation. Or maybe that’s just the New Yorkers. For the sake of argument, we'll assume so.