The Ten Year Affair from Erin Somers: A Middle-Aged Adultery Story Our Era Deserves.

In the novel by Erin Somers The Ten Year Affair, we meet Cora, a millennial mother who yearns for a bygone kind of passion with a bygone kind of man. Unfortunately for her, the modern ethical landscape is inflexible and jaded, so rather than embarking on the affair, Cora spends 10 years overthinking it, fantasising about it and talking it over with her potential lover, Sam – a father from her child's circle who holds the title “head narrative architect” at a mortgage start-up. This novel positions itself as a humorous twist 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 definitive narrative of middle-aged unfaithfulness our entire generation deserves: an energetic, clever critique of insufferable hand-wringers who’ve managed to ruin even sex.

Depicting Self-Satisfied Unhappiness

The central couple, Cora and Eliot are highly educated, somewhat arrogant former city dwellers who, with rents rising and children growing, have moved reluctantly upstate. Caught in the “gruelling all-the-time-ness” of parenthood, they juggle desk jobs, two children, and a persistent mushroom proliferating beneath their bathroom tiles that they lack the energy and money to sort out. They spend time with similarly minded urban exiles who have fled the city to drink negronis from rustic glassware and critique one another closer to nature. Yet Cora's isolation 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 high-minded and oblivious. He snacks casually as she scrubs the oven and states he has no desire to own her. In her mind, Cora pictures herself trying to survive with Eliot in the woods, doing laundry by hand while he searches for chanterelles. She deeply desires excitement, a bit of depravity, a partner who will beg, and adore, 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 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 says, but really about everything). 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 demurs while Cora languishes. She constructs a parallel reality running concurrent to her actual existence, where instead of bills and school pickups, she has passion, luxury, and her imagined lover. As this fantasy dims, her mind conjures “a Gallic character called Baptiste” who joins Sam in assisting her from the tub, “nothing for her to do, no tasks, no requirements, other than to be revered as a youthful bride, tragically lost to illness”.

A Sad Conclusion and Deeper Themes

When they eventually succumb to temptation, their intimacy is melancholy, lacking in fun or mutual connection. It isn’t the sepia-toned romance she dreamed up for a full decade. Cora puts on an alluring gown and Sam “performs oral sex with grim determination in their hotel room” before dinner. The reader senses that Cora wants to inhabit a certain type of literary world, where sex is sordid and confusing, where imbalances of control exist, and characters act out, and nobody keeps score.

Throughout the novel the core issue for Cora: 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 ensured he was aroused, but failed to remove his casual footwear from the shot”. Since the event that diminished their pleasure was parenthood, one worries about the impact these flawed adults have on their kids. As her daughter inquires about sex, the parents stumble. They begin with procreation then concede that sex serves other purposes. The father references male anatomy then admits it is not essential. Ultimately, he settles for, “you know genitals?”

Underpinning the narrative runs the subtle undercurrent of familiar middle-age questions: do our lives have meaning? What follows our final breath? These themes are more explicit in Cora's internal dialogues. Reading these exchanges, the reader may ponder what lesson Cora and her jaded circle would take from their unsatisfying escapades. Might Cora become more receptive of life’s imperfect joys, its corny pleasures? Upon being questioned by Eliot about her affair during an audio program on bondage, Cora reflects “every serious exchange is undermined by its particulars”. Others could argue it's enriched. Yet that is not her nature, and Somers doesn’t give her character false epiphanies, or force growth beyond her capacity.

A Final Appraisal

This is a razor-sharp, hilarious, finely observed novel, crafted with such withering exactitude. It is profoundly self-aware, economical yet rich with implication: a portrait of an anxious, loin-girding generation in middle age, perpetually self-conscious, simultaneously terrified of and hungry for intense experience. Or maybe that’s just the New Yorkers. For the sake of argument, we'll assume so.