A Decade-Long Liaison by author Erin Somers: A Middle-Aged Infidelity Story Our Generation Has Earned.

In the novel by Erin Somers The Ten Year Affair, the story centers on a millennial mother named Cora, a woman in her prime who craves a bygone kind of passion with a man of a different time. Unfortunately for her, the modern ethical landscape is rigid and cynical, and instead of having the affair, Cora spends 10 years obsessively analyzing it, daydreaming of 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 positions itself as a humorous twist on the classic adultery novel and a sharp satire of a narrow, self-conscious group of downwardly mobile New Yorkers. It stands as the midlife adultery story this current cohort deserves: a propulsive, witty takedown of insufferable hand-wringers who’ve managed to ruin even sex.

Depicting Smug Unhappiness

Cora and her husband Eliot are smug, overeducated Brooklynites who, with rents rising and children growing, have relocated with hesitation upstate. Trapped by the “exhausting constant demands” of raising children, they have office careers, a pair of kids, and an ongoing fungal issue growing under their bathroom tiles that they lack the energy and money to sort out. Their social circle similarly minded urban exiles who have escaped the metropolis to sip craft cocktails out of mason jars and critique one another closer to nature. Yet Cora's isolation here, it stems not from her own critical, joyless perspective but because her suburban peers are “boring and self-absorbed, 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 says he doesn’t wish to possess her. In her mind, Cora pictures them attempting to endure with Eliot in the woods, doing laundry by hand while he forages for mushrooms. She longs for drama, a bit of depravity, a lover who will beg, and adore, and “express raw admiration for her prowess”.

"The mundane grind of everyday existence, you had to admire its consistency."

The Problem of High-Minded Desire

The trouble 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 in truth, about all aspects of life). What she feels 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 an alternate timeline running concurrent to her actual existence, where in place of chores and errands, she has sex and hotels and Sam. When her fictional romance fizzles, her mind conjures “a French guy named Baptiste” who joins Sam in assisting her from the tub, “nothing for her to do, no responsibilities, no obligations, except to be worshipped like someone’s teenage wife, who’d died improbably of TB”.

A Sad Conclusion and Deeper Themes

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 a full decade. Cora dons a slinky dress and Sam “stoically eat[s] her out in their hotel room” before dinner. One imagines that Cora desires to inhabit a certain type of literary world, where sex is sordid and confusing, where the power dynamics are unequal, and characters act out, and no one tallies the cost.

Somers consistently suggests the root of Cora’s problem: she has such cutting wit, but so little joy. Of Sam’s erotic photo, Cora critiques, “he has clenched his abs and ensured he was aroused, but has not cleared the frame of Crocs”. Given that the catalyst that diminished their pleasure was having children, readers may fret about the impact these flawed adults have on their kids. When Cora’s daughter asks about sex, the adults fumble. They begin with procreation then concede that sex isn’t always about babies. The father references male anatomy then admits it is not essential. Finally, he lands on, “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 ideas are more explicit in Cora’s imagined conversations. Considering these passages, one wonders what lesson Cora and her cynical lot would derive from their disappointing dramas. Would Cora grow more receptive of life’s flawed pleasures, 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 her character false epiphanies, or force growth beyond her capacity.

An Ultimate Assessment

The result is an incisive, hilarious, finely observed novel, written with devastating precision. It is profoundly self-aware, economical yet rich with implication: a depiction of a worried, self-protective cohort in middle age, perpetually self-conscious, at once afraid of and desperate for sensation. Or maybe that’s just the New Yorkers. Let’s say it is.