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In Erin Somers’s The Ten Year Affair, the story centers on a millennial mother named Cora, a millennial mother who craves a bygone kind of passion from a bygone kind of man. Sadly, for Cora, morality in 2015 is rigid and cynical, and instead of having the affair, Cora devotes 10 years overthinking it, fantasising about it and discussing it with the object of her desire, Sam – a father from her child's circle who works as “head narrative architect” at a fintech company. The book presents itself as a comic take 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 our entire generation has coming: an energetic, clever critique of insufferable hand-wringers who’ve somehow spoiled even sex.

Depicting Smug Unhappiness

Cora and her husband Eliot are highly educated, somewhat arrogant former city dwellers who, with rents rising and children growing, have moved reluctantly to the suburbs. Caught in the “gruelling all-the-time-ness” of parenthood, they have desk jobs, a pair of kids, and an ongoing fungal issue growing under their bathroom tiles that they lack the energy and money to sort out. They spend time with similarly minded urban exiles who have escaped the metropolis to drink negronis out of mason jars and judge each other closer to nature. Yet Cora's isolation in this new environment, it’s not because her fussy, lifeless lens but because her new neighbours are “dull and vain, even more so than in their previous urban life”.

Eliot is 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, washing clothes on a stone while he searches for chanterelles. She deeply desires excitement, some moral abandon, a lover who will plead, and adore, and “express raw admiration for her prowess”.

"The shabbiness of real life, you had to admire its consistency."

The Problem of High-Minded Desire

The trouble is that she’s as high-minded and rigid as Eliot, and incapable of that kind of abandon herself. It’s “too much to ask her to be passionate” (about work, she claims, but in truth, about all aspects of life). What she feels for Sam are “tepid, barely beyond simple fondness”. She wants “to get fucked into the astral plane and not think about her life for a second”. Yet, for a decade, Sam refuses while Cora pines. She constructs a parallel reality alongside her real life, where in place of chores and errands, 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 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 Disappointing Climax and Undercurrents

When they eventually succumb to temptation, their intimacy is melancholy, 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 desires to slip inside 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.

Somers consistently suggests the root of Cora’s problem: she possesses a sharp tongue, but so little joy. Regarding an intimate picture from Sam, Cora complains, “he has clenched his abs and made sure he was hard, but failed to remove his casual footwear from the shot”. Given that the catalyst that diminished their pleasure was having children, one worries about the impact these flawed adults have on their kids. As her daughter inquires about sex, the parents stumble. They start with babies then acknowledge that sex isn’t always about babies. Eliot mentions a penis then concedes that one isn’t required. Ultimately, he settles for, “you're aware of private parts?”

Beneath the story runs the subtle undercurrent of common existential queries of midlife: do our lives have meaning? What follows our final breath? These themes are more directly explored in Cora's internal dialogues. Reading these exchanges, one wonders 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? When Eliot asks about her affair during an audio program on bondage, 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 her character false epiphanies, or stretch her where she is unable to go.

A Final Appraisal

This is an incisive, uproariously funny, finely observed novel, crafted with such withering exactitude. It is absolutely aware of itself, spare and brimming with subtext: a depiction of an anxious, loin-girding generation in middle age, chronically embarrassed, 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.