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In Erin Somers’s The Ten Year Affair, we meet Cora, a woman in her prime who craves a type of romance from another era 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 devotes 10 years obsessively analyzing it, daydreaming of it and discussing it with her potential lover, Sam – a father from her child's circle who works as “head narrative architect” at a mortgage start-up. The book presents itself as a comic take on the classic adultery novel and a sharp satire of a particular, self-aware clique of downwardly mobile New Yorkers. One could call it the midlife adultery story our entire generation has coming: an energetic, clever critique of insufferable hand-wringers who’ve managed to ruin intimacy itself.

A Portrait of Smug Unhappiness

The central couple, Cora and Eliot are smug, overeducated Brooklynites who, with rents rising and children growing, have moved reluctantly upstate. Caught in the “gruelling all-the-time-ness” of raising children, they juggle desk jobs, a pair of kids, and an ongoing fungal issue growing under their bathroom tiles which they cannot afford or muster the will to fix. They spend time with similarly minded urban exiles who have fled the city to drink negronis from rustic glassware 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, even more so than in their previous urban life”.

Her husband Eliot remains high-minded and oblivious. He eats popcorn as she scrubs the oven 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 drama, some moral abandon, a lover who will plead, and adore, and “express raw admiration for her prowess”.

"The mundane grind of everyday existence, 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 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). Her feelings for Sam are “tepid, barely beyond simple fondness”. She wants “a transcendent physical experience and escape her own reality momentarily”. Yet, for a decade, Sam refuses while Cora pines. She imagines an alternate timeline 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 French guy named Baptiste” who teams up with Sam in assisting her from the tub, “nothing for her to do, no tasks, no requirements, other than to be revered like someone’s teenage wife, who’d died improbably of TB”.

A Disappointing Conclusion and Undercurrents

When they eventually succumb to temptation, their intimacy is melancholy, lacking in fun or mutual connection. It isn’t the nostalgically perfect affair she fantasized about for 10 years. Cora puts on a slinky dress and Sam “performs oral sex with grim determination within their rented space” before dinner. One imagines that Cora wants to slip inside a James Salter novel, where intimacy is messy and ambiguous, 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. Of Sam’s erotic photo, Cora critiques, “he tightened his stomach and ensured he was aroused, but failed to remove his casual footwear from the shot”. Given that the catalyst that diminished their pleasure was having children, readers may fret about what these idiots are doing to their children. As her daughter inquires about sex, the adults fumble. They begin with procreation then concede that sex serves other purposes. The father references male anatomy then concedes that one isn’t required. Ultimately, he settles for, “you know genitals?”

Underpinning the narrative runs the subtle undercurrent of common existential queries of midlife: is there purpose to our existence? Where do we go after death? These themes are more directly explored in Cora's internal dialogues. Reading these exchanges, one wonders what lesson Cora and her cynical lot would take from their disappointing dramas. Would Cora grow more receptive of life’s imperfect joys, its corny pleasures? When Eliot asks about her affair during an audio program on bondage, Cora reflects “all meaningful communication is compromised by specific context”. Some might say enhanced. But that’s not Cora, 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, finely observed novel, crafted with such withering exactitude. It is profoundly self-aware, spare and brimming with subtext: a portrait 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.