A Decade-Long Liaison from author Erin Somers: The Midlife Adultery Tale This Generation Needs.

Within Erin Somers’s The Ten Year Affair, we meet Cora, a woman in her prime who desperately wants 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 spends a full decade overthinking it, daydreaming of it and talking it over with the object of her desire, Sam – a father from her child's circle who holds the title “head narrative architect” at a fintech company. The book presents itself as a humorous twist on the classic adultery novel and a send-up of a narrow, self-conscious group of economically slipping New Yorkers. One could call it the definitive narrative of middle-aged unfaithfulness this current cohort has coming: a propulsive, witty takedown of unbearably anxious individuals who’ve managed to ruin even sex.

A Portrait of 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. Trapped by the “exhausting constant demands” of raising children, they have 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 critique one another amidst a more rural setting. Yet Cora's isolation here, it stems not from her fussy, lifeless lens but because her new neighbours are “boring and self-absorbed, duller and vainer than they were back in the city”.

Eliot is high-minded and oblivious. He snacks casually as she scrubs the oven and states he has no desire to own her. Cora imagines herself trying to survive with Eliot in the woods, doing laundry by hand while he forages for mushrooms. She deeply desires 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 Problem of High-Minded Desire

The central conflict is that she’s as high-minded and rigid as Eliot, and unable to surrender to primal passion. She finds it "an overwhelming request to feel fervor" (about work, she claims, but really about everything). What she feels for Sam are “tepid, barely beyond simple fondness”. She wants “to get fucked into the astral plane and escape her own reality momentarily”. Yet, for a decade, Sam demurs while Cora pines. She imagines an alternate timeline running concurrent to her actual existence, where in place of chores and errands, she has sex and hotels and Sam. As this fantasy dims, she imagines “a French guy named Baptiste” who teams up with Sam in assisting her from the tub, “leaving her with no duties, no responsibilities, no obligations, other than to be revered as a youthful bride, who’d died improbably of TB”.

A Sad Climax and Undercurrents

When they eventually succumb to their desires, their intimacy is melancholy, lacking in fun or mutual connection. It fails to be the nostalgically perfect affair she fantasized about for 10 years. Cora dons an alluring gown and Sam “stoically eat[s] her out within their rented space” before dinner. One imagines that Cora desires 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.

Somers consistently suggests the core issue for Cora: she possesses a sharp tongue, but a profound lack of happiness. Of Sam’s erotic photo, Cora critiques, “he has clenched his abs 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. When Cora’s daughter asks about sex, the parents stumble. They start with babies then concede that sex isn’t always about babies. The father references male anatomy then admits it is not essential. Ultimately, he settles for, “you know genitals?”

Underpinning the narrative flows a quiet theme of common existential queries of midlife: do our lives have meaning? What follows our final breath? These ideas are more explicit in Cora’s imagined conversations. Considering these passages, one wonders what moral Cora and her cynical lot would take from their unsatisfying escapades. Would Cora grow more open to life’s flawed pleasures, its sentimental delights? Upon being questioned by Eliot about her affair in the middle of a podcast about rope, Cora reflects “all meaningful communication is undermined by its particulars”. Others could argue it's enriched. But that’s not Cora, and Somers doesn’t give her character false epiphanies, or force growth beyond her capacity.

An Ultimate Appraisal

This is an incisive, hilarious, exquisitely detailed novel, written with devastating precision. It is profoundly self-aware, spare and brimming with subtext: a portrait of a worried, self-protective cohort entering midlife, chronically embarrassed, simultaneously terrified of and hungry for intense experience. Perhaps this is solely a metropolitan trait. For the sake of argument, we'll assume so.