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In the novel by Erin Somers The Ten Year Affair, the story centers on a millennial mother named Cora, a millennial mother who yearns for a bygone kind of passion with a bygone kind of man. Sadly, for Cora, morality in 2015 is rigid and cynical, and instead of having the affair, Cora devotes a full decade overthinking it, daydreaming of it and discussing it with the object of her desire, Sam – a father from her child's circle who works as “head narrative architect” at a mortgage start-up. The book positions itself as a humorous twist on the traditional tale of infidelity and a send-up of a particular, self-aware clique of economically slipping New Yorkers. It stands as the definitive narrative of middle-aged unfaithfulness this current cohort has coming: an energetic, clever critique of insufferable hand-wringers who’ve managed to ruin even sex.

A Portrait of Smug Discontent

Cora and her husband Eliot are highly educated, somewhat arrogant former city dwellers who, as costs increased and their family expanded, have moved reluctantly to the suburbs. Trapped by the “exhausting constant demands” of raising children, they juggle office careers, two children, 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 fled the city to sip craft cocktails from rustic glassware and judge each other 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 “boring and self-absorbed, even more so than in their previous urban life”.

Her husband Eliot remains intellectually lofty and utterly unaware. He snacks casually as she scrubs the oven and states he has no desire to own her. In her mind, Cora pictures them attempting to endure 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 plead, and adore, and “growl at the feet of the woman’s excellence”.

"The shabbiness of real life, one must acknowledge its relentless predictability."

The Problem of Over-Intellectualized Longing

The central conflict 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” (regarding her career, she claims, but in truth, about all aspects of life). What she feels for Sam are “tepid, barely beyond simple fondness”. She craves “a transcendent physical experience and not think about her life for a second”. Yet, for a decade, Sam demurs while Cora languishes. She constructs a parallel reality alongside her real life, where in place of chores and errands, she has sex and hotels and Sam. When her fictional romance fizzles, her mind conjures “a Gallic character called Baptiste” who teams up with Sam in helping her out of the bath, “nothing for her to do, no tasks, no obligations, other than to be revered like someone’s teenage wife, who’d died improbably of TB”.

A Disappointing Conclusion and Deeper Themes

When they finally do give in to temptation, their intimacy is melancholy, without much play or complicity. It isn’t the sepia-toned romance she fantasized about for 10 years. Cora dons a slinky dress and Sam “stoically eat[s] her out in their hotel room” before dinner. One imagines that Cora desires to slip inside a certain type of literary world, 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 has such cutting wit, but so little joy. Regarding an intimate picture from Sam, Cora critiques, “he has clenched his abs and made sure he was hard, but failed to remove his casual footwear from the shot”. Given that the catalyst that killed their fun was parenthood, one worries about what these idiots are doing to their children. When Cora’s daughter asks about sex, the parents stumble. They begin with procreation then concede that sex isn’t always about babies. The father references male anatomy then admits it is not essential. Ultimately, he settles for, “you know genitals?”

Beneath the story runs the subtle undercurrent of common existential queries of midlife: is there purpose to our existence? What follows our final breath? These themes are more explicit in Cora’s imagined conversations. Considering these passages, one wonders what lesson Cora and her cynical lot would take from their disappointing dramas. Would Cora grow more receptive of life’s flawed pleasures, its sentimental delights? When Eliot asks about her affair during an audio program on bondage, Cora thinks “every serious exchange is compromised by specific context”. Some might say enhanced. Yet that is not her nature, and the author refuses to grant the protagonist easy revelations, or stretch her where she is unable to go.

An Ultimate Assessment

This is a razor-sharp, uproariously funny, exquisitely detailed novel, crafted with such withering exactitude. It is absolutely aware of itself, economical yet rich with implication: a portrait of an anxious, loin-girding generation 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.