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Within the novel by Erin Somers The Ten Year Affair, we meet a millennial mother named Cora, a millennial mother who yearns for a bygone kind of passion with a man of a different time. Unfortunately for her, morality in 2015 is rigid and cynical, so rather than embarking on the affair, Cora spends a full decade overthinking it, fantasising about it and discussing it with her potential lover, Sam – a playgroup dad who works as “head narrative architect” at a fintech company. This novel presents itself as a humorous twist on the traditional tale of infidelity and a send-up of a particular, self-aware clique of downwardly mobile New Yorkers. One could call it the midlife adultery story this current cohort deserves: a propulsive, witty takedown of insufferable hand-wringers who’ve somehow spoiled intimacy itself.

A Portrait of Smug Discontent

The central couple, Cora and Eliot are highly educated, somewhat arrogant former city dwellers who, as costs increased and their family expanded, have relocated with hesitation upstate. Caught in the “gruelling all-the-time-ness” of raising children, they have office careers, two children, and a persistent mushroom growing under their bathroom tiles that they lack the energy and money to sort out. Their social circle similarly minded urban exiles who have fled the city to sip craft cocktails from rustic glassware and judge each other closer to nature. Yet Cora's isolation here, it stems not from her own critical, joyless perspective but because her suburban peers are “dull and vain, even more so than in their previous urban life”.

Eliot is intellectually lofty and utterly unaware. 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 a rustic life together, washing clothes on a stone while he forages for mushrooms. She deeply desires excitement, some moral abandon, a partner who will beg, and worship, and “growl at the feet of the woman’s excellence”.

"The mundane grind of everyday existence, one must acknowledge its relentless predictability."

The Problem of Over-Intellectualized Longing

The trouble 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 says, but really about everything). Her feelings for Sam are “bland, liking-adjacent”. She craves “a transcendent physical experience and escape her own reality momentarily”. Yet, for a decade, Sam demurs while Cora pines. 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. 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 tasks, no requirements, except to be worshipped like someone’s teenage wife, tragically lost to illness”.

A Disappointing Conclusion and Deeper Themes

When they finally do give in to temptation, their intimacy is melancholy, lacking in fun or mutual connection. It fails to be the sepia-toned romance she dreamed up for a full decade. Cora dons an alluring gown and Sam “stoically eat[s] her out within their rented space” prior to a meal. The reader senses that Cora wants 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.

Throughout the novel the root of Cora’s problem: she possesses a sharp tongue, but a profound lack of happiness. Regarding an intimate picture from Sam, Cora critiques, “he tightened his stomach 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 parenthood, readers may fret 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 serves other purposes. Eliot mentions a penis then admits it is not essential. Ultimately, he settles for, “you know genitals?”

Beneath the story runs the subtle undercurrent of common existential queries of midlife: is there purpose to our existence? What follows our final breath? These themes are more explicit in Cora’s imagined conversations. Reading these exchanges, one wonders what moral Cora and her jaded circle would take from their unsatisfying escapades. Might Cora become more open to life’s flawed pleasures, 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. Yet that is not her nature, and the author refuses to grant the protagonist easy revelations, or force growth beyond her capacity.

A Final Assessment

The result is an incisive, hilarious, exquisitely detailed novel, crafted with devastating precision. It is profoundly self-aware, spare and brimming with subtext: a portrait of a worried, self-protective cohort entering midlife, perpetually self-conscious, at once afraid of and desperate for sensation. Perhaps this is solely a metropolitan trait. Let’s say it is.