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Within the novel by Erin Somers The Ten Year Affair, the story centers on Cora, a woman in her prime who yearns for a bygone kind of passion from a bygone kind of man. Unfortunately for her, the modern ethical landscape is rigid and cynical, so rather than embarking on the affair, Cora devotes 10 years overthinking it, fantasising about it and talking it over with her potential lover, Sam – a playgroup dad who holds the title “chief storytelling officer” at a mortgage start-up. This novel positions itself as a humorous twist on the classic adultery novel and a send-up of a particular, self-aware clique of economically slipping New Yorkers. It stands as the midlife adultery story this current cohort has coming: an energetic, clever critique of unbearably anxious individuals who’ve somehow spoiled even sex.

A Portrait of Self-Satisfied Unhappiness

Cora and her husband Eliot are smug, overeducated Brooklynites who, with rents rising and children growing, have moved reluctantly to the suburbs. Caught in the “gruelling all-the-time-ness” of parenthood, they juggle office careers, two children, and a persistent mushroom proliferating beneath 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 from rustic glassware and judge each other amidst a more rural setting. But if Cora is lonely here, it stems not from her own critical, joyless perspective but because her new neighbours are “boring and self-absorbed, duller and vainer than they were back in the city”.

Her husband Eliot remains intellectually lofty and utterly unaware. He eats popcorn while she cleans vigorously and says he doesn’t wish to possess her. Cora imagines herself trying to survive a rustic life together, doing laundry by hand while he searches for chanterelles. She longs for drama, some moral abandon, a partner who will plead, and worship, and “growl at the feet of the woman’s excellence”.

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

The Trouble with High-Minded Longing

The central conflict is that Cora is just as intellectually constrained as her husband, and unable to surrender to primal passion. She finds it "an overwhelming request to feel fervor" (about work, she claims, but really about everything). Her feelings for Sam are “bland, liking-adjacent”. She craves “a transcendent physical experience and not think about her life for a second”. Yet, for a decade, Sam refuses 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 Gallic character called Baptiste” who teams up with Sam in assisting her from the tub, “leaving her with no duties, no tasks, no obligations, except to be worshipped as a youthful bride, tragically lost to illness”.

A Sad Climax and Undercurrents

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 dreamed up for 10 years. Cora dons an alluring gown and Sam “performs oral sex with grim determination in their hotel room” before dinner. One imagines that Cora wants to inhabit a certain type of literary world, where intimacy is messy and ambiguous, where imbalances of control exist, and everyone misbehaves, and nobody keeps score.

Throughout the novel the core issue for Cora: she possesses a sharp tongue, but so little joy. 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”. Since the event that killed their fun was having children, readers may fret about what these idiots are doing to their children. When Cora’s daughter asks about sex, the adults fumble. They start with babies then acknowledge that sex serves other purposes. The father references male anatomy then admits it is not essential. Ultimately, he settles for, “you know genitals?”

Beneath the story flows a quiet theme of common existential queries of midlife: do our lives have meaning? Where do we go after death? These themes are more directly explored in Cora’s imagined conversations. Reading these exchanges, the reader may ponder what moral Cora and her jaded circle would derive from their disappointing dramas. Might Cora become more open to life’s imperfect joys, its sentimental delights? Upon being questioned by Eliot 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 Somers doesn’t give the protagonist easy revelations, or stretch her where she is unable to go.

A Final Appraisal

The result is an incisive, hilarious, exquisitely detailed novel, written with devastating precision. It is profoundly self-aware, economical yet rich with implication: a portrait of a worried, self-protective cohort entering midlife, chronically embarrassed, simultaneously terrified of and hungry for intense experience. Or maybe that’s just the New Yorkers. Let’s say it is.