The Ten Year Affair by Erin Somers: The Midlife Adultery Tale This Generation Needs.
In the novel by Erin Somers The Ten Year Affair, the story centers on a millennial mother named Cora, a millennial mother who craves a type of romance from another era from a man of a different time. Unfortunately for her, the modern ethical landscape is inflexible and jaded, and instead of having the affair, Cora devotes a full decade overthinking it, fantasising about it and talking it over with the object of her desire, Sam – a playgroup dad who works as “head narrative architect” at a fintech company. The book presents itself as a comic take on the traditional tale of infidelity and a sharp satire of a narrow, self-conscious group of downwardly mobile New Yorkers. It stands as the midlife adultery story this current cohort deserves: a propulsive, witty takedown of unbearably anxious individuals 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 moved reluctantly to the suburbs. Caught in the “exhausting constant demands” of parenthood, they have office careers, two children, and an ongoing fungal issue growing under 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 sip craft cocktails out of mason jars 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 suburban peers are “dull and vain, 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. Cora imagines them attempting to endure with Eliot in the woods, washing clothes on a stone while he forages for mushrooms. She deeply desires excitement, some moral abandon, a partner who will beg, and adore, and “express raw admiration for her prowess”.
"The shabbiness of real life, one must acknowledge its relentless predictability."
The Problem of High-Minded Desire
The trouble is that she’s as high-minded and rigid as Eliot, and incapable of that kind of abandon herself. She finds it "an overwhelming request to feel fervor" (about work, she claims, but in truth, about all aspects of life). What she feels for Sam are “bland, liking-adjacent”. She wants “a transcendent physical experience and not think about her life for a second”. Yet, for a decade, Sam demurs while Cora pines. She imagines a parallel reality 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, she imagines “a Gallic character called 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 as a youthful bride, who’d died improbably of TB”.
A Sad Conclusion and Undercurrents
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 fantasized about for a full decade. Cora dons an alluring gown and Sam “performs oral sex with grim determination within their rented space” prior to a meal. The reader senses that Cora wants to inhabit a James Salter novel, where sex is sordid and confusing, where imbalances of control exist, and characters act out, and no one tallies the cost.
Throughout the novel the root of Cora’s problem: she has such cutting wit, but a profound lack of happiness. Regarding an intimate picture from Sam, Cora critiques, “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. As her daughter inquires about sex, the adults fumble. They begin with procreation then acknowledge that sex serves other purposes. Eliot mentions a penis then admits it is not essential. Finally, he lands on, “you know genitals?”
Beneath the story flows a quiet theme of common existential queries of midlife: is there purpose to our existence? What follows our final breath? These themes are more directly explored in Cora’s imagined conversations. Reading these exchanges, the reader may ponder what lesson Cora and her cynical lot would take from their unsatisfying escapades. Might Cora become more receptive of life’s flawed pleasures, its sentimental delights? Upon being questioned by Eliot about her affair in the middle of a podcast about rope, Cora thinks “every serious exchange 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 force growth beyond her capacity.
An Ultimate Appraisal
This is a razor-sharp, uproariously funny, finely observed 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. Let’s say it is.
