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 from a man of a different time. Sadly, for Cora, the modern ethical landscape is rigid and cynical, so rather than embarking on the affair, Cora devotes a full decade overthinking it, fantasising about it and discussing it with the object of her desire, Sam – a playgroup dad who works as “head narrative architect” at a mortgage start-up. This novel presents itself as a humorous twist on the traditional tale of infidelity and a send-up of a narrow, self-conscious group of downwardly mobile New Yorkers. One could call it the definitive narrative of middle-aged unfaithfulness this current cohort has coming: a propulsive, witty takedown of insufferable hand-wringers who’ve somehow spoiled intimacy itself.
Depicting Self-Satisfied Unhappiness
The central couple, Cora and Eliot are smug, overeducated Brooklynites who, with rents rising and children growing, have moved reluctantly to the suburbs. Trapped by the “exhausting constant demands” of raising children, they have 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 similarly minded urban exiles who have fled the city to drink negronis out of mason jars and judge each other amidst a more rural setting. But if Cora is lonely in this new environment, it stems not from her own critical, joyless perspective but because her new neighbours 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 while she cleans vigorously and states he has no desire to own her. In her mind, Cora pictures them attempting to endure a rustic life together, washing clothes on a stone while he searches for chanterelles. She longs for excitement, some moral abandon, a partner who will beg, and worship, and “growl at the feet of the woman’s excellence”.
"The mundane grind of everyday existence, one must acknowledge its relentless predictability."
The Trouble with 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 says, but really about everything). What she feels for Sam are “tepid, barely beyond simple fondness”. She wants “a transcendent physical experience and escape her own reality momentarily”. But, for years, Sam demurs while Cora languishes. She constructs a parallel reality alongside her real life, where instead of bills and school pickups, she has passion, luxury, and her imagined lover. As this fantasy dims, she imagines “a French guy named 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 as a youthful bride, who’d died improbably of TB”.
A Sad Conclusion and Deeper Themes
When they eventually succumb to temptation, the sex is sad, lacking in fun or mutual connection. It fails to be the sepia-toned romance she fantasized about for a full decade. Cora dons an alluring gown and Sam “stoically eat[s] her out 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 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 tightened his stomach and made sure he was hard, but has not cleared the frame of Crocs”. Since the event that killed their fun was having children, one worries about the impact these flawed adults have on their kids. As her daughter inquires about sex, the adults fumble. They start with babies then concede that sex isn’t always about babies. The father references male anatomy then concedes that one isn’t required. Finally, he lands on, “you're aware of private parts?”
Underpinning the narrative flows a quiet theme of familiar middle-age questions: do our lives have meaning? What follows our final breath? These themes are more directly explored in Cora’s imagined conversations. Considering these passages, the reader may ponder what moral Cora and her jaded circle would derive 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”. Others could argue it's enriched. But that’s not Cora, and Somers doesn’t give the protagonist easy revelations, or force growth beyond her capacity.
A Final Assessment
This is an incisive, uproariously funny, exquisitely detailed novel, written with such withering exactitude. It is absolutely aware of itself, spare and brimming with subtext: a portrait of a worried, self-protective cohort entering midlife, perpetually self-conscious, at once afraid of and desperate for sensation. Or maybe that’s just the New Yorkers. Let’s say it is.
