A Decade-Long Liaison from Erin Somers: A Middle-Aged Adultery Tale This Era Deserves.
Within Erin Somers’s The Ten Year Affair, we meet a millennial mother named Cora, a woman in her prime who desperately wants a type of romance from another era with a man of a different time. Unfortunately for her, the modern ethical landscape is inflexible and jaded, so rather than embarking on the affair, Cora spends a full decade overthinking it, fantasising about it and discussing it 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. This novel positions itself as a comic take on the traditional tale of infidelity 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: an energetic, clever critique of unbearably anxious individuals who’ve somehow spoiled even sex.
Depicting Smug Discontent
Cora and her husband Eliot are smug, overeducated Brooklynites who, as costs increased and their family expanded, have moved reluctantly upstate. Caught in the “gruelling all-the-time-ness” of raising children, they juggle desk jobs, two children, and an ongoing fungal issue growing under their bathroom tiles which they cannot afford or muster the will to fix. Their social circle other smug, overeducated Brooklynites who have fled the city to sip craft cocktails from rustic glassware and critique one another amidst a more rural setting. Yet Cora's isolation in this new environment, it stems not from her own critical, joyless perspective 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 snacks casually while she cleans vigorously 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 excitement, a bit of depravity, a lover who will plead, and worship, and “express raw admiration for her prowess”.
"The mundane grind of everyday existence, you had to admire its consistency."
The Trouble with Over-Intellectualized Longing
The trouble is that Cora is just as intellectually constrained as her husband, and incapable of that kind of abandon herself. She finds it "an overwhelming request to feel fervor" (regarding her career, she says, but really about everything). Her feelings for Sam are “bland, liking-adjacent”. She wants “to get fucked into the astral plane and not think about her life for a second”. Yet, for a decade, Sam demurs while Cora languishes. She constructs a parallel reality alongside her real life, where instead of bills and school pickups, she has sex and hotels and Sam. When her fictional romance fizzles, her mind conjures “a French guy named Baptiste” who teams up with Sam in helping her out of the bath, “nothing for her to do, no tasks, no obligations, except to be worshipped like someone’s teenage wife, tragically lost to illness”.
A Sad Climax and Undercurrents
When they eventually succumb to their desires, their intimacy is melancholy, without much play or complicity. It fails to be the sepia-toned romance she dreamed up for 10 years. Cora dons a slinky dress and Sam “stoically eat[s] her out within their rented space” before dinner. The reader senses that Cora wants to inhabit a certain type of literary world, where sex is sordid and confusing, where the power dynamics are unequal, and everyone misbehaves, and nobody keeps score.
Throughout the novel the core issue for Cora: she has such cutting wit, but a profound lack of happiness. Regarding an intimate picture from Sam, Cora critiques, “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 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 adults fumble. They start with babies then acknowledge that sex serves other purposes. The father references male anatomy then admits it is not essential. Finally, he lands on, “you know genitals?”
Beneath the story runs the subtle undercurrent of familiar middle-age questions: do our lives have meaning? Where do we go after death? 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 imperfect joys, its corny pleasures? Upon being questioned by Eliot about her affair in the middle of a podcast about rope, Cora reflects “every serious exchange is undermined by its particulars”. Others could argue it's enriched. Yet that is not her nature, and Somers doesn’t give her character false epiphanies, or stretch her where she is unable to go.
An Ultimate Appraisal
This is a razor-sharp, hilarious, exquisitely detailed novel, written with such withering exactitude. It is absolutely aware of itself, spare and brimming with subtext: a portrait of a worried, self-protective cohort in middle age, chronically embarrassed, at once afraid of and desperate for sensation. Perhaps this is solely a metropolitan trait. For the sake of argument, we'll assume so.
