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In the novel by Erin Somers The Ten Year Affair, the story centers on Cora, a woman in her prime who yearns for a type of romance from another era with a man of a different time. Sadly, for Cora, morality in 2015 is rigid and cynical, and instead of having the affair, Cora devotes 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 mortgage start-up. The book positions itself as a humorous twist on the classic adultery novel 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 even sex.

Depicting Self-Satisfied Unhappiness

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. Trapped by the “exhausting constant demands” of parenthood, they have office careers, two children, 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 amidst a more rural setting. Yet Cora's isolation here, it’s not because her fussy, lifeless lens but because her new neighbours are “dull and vain, duller and vainer than they were back in the city”.

Her husband Eliot remains intellectually lofty and utterly unaware. He eats popcorn while she cleans vigorously and says he doesn’t wish to possess her. In her mind, Cora pictures them attempting to endure a rustic life together, doing laundry by hand while he searches for chanterelles. She longs for drama, some moral abandon, a partner 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 Problem of High-Minded Longing

The central conflict is that Cora is just as intellectually constrained as her husband, and incapable of that kind of abandon herself. It’s “too much to ask her to be passionate” (regarding her career, she claims, but in truth, about all aspects of life). Her feelings for Sam are “tepid, barely beyond simple fondness”. She craves “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 passion, luxury, and her imagined lover. As this fantasy dims, her mind conjures “a French guy named Baptiste” who joins Sam in helping her out of the bath, “leaving her with no duties, no responsibilities, no requirements, except to be worshipped like someone’s teenage wife, who’d died improbably of TB”.

A Sad Climax and Undercurrents

When they finally do give in to temptation, their intimacy is melancholy, without much play or complicity. It fails to be the nostalgically perfect affair she dreamed up for a full decade. Cora puts on a slinky dress and Sam “performs oral sex with grim determination 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 the power dynamics are unequal, 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 complains, “he tightened his stomach and ensured he was aroused, but failed to remove his casual footwear from the shot”. Since the event that diminished their pleasure was having children, readers may fret about what these idiots are doing to their children. As her daughter inquires about sex, the parents stumble. They start with babies then concede that sex isn’t always about babies. The father references male anatomy then concedes that one isn’t required. Finally, he lands on, “you're aware of private parts?”

Underpinning the narrative runs the subtle undercurrent 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 lesson Cora and her cynical lot would derive 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 during an audio program on bondage, Cora reflects “all meaningful communication is undermined by its particulars”. Others could argue it's enriched. But that’s not Cora, and the author refuses to grant the protagonist easy revelations, or force growth beyond her capacity.

An Ultimate Assessment

The result is a razor-sharp, hilarious, exquisitely detailed novel, written with such withering exactitude. It is profoundly self-aware, economical yet rich with implication: a depiction of a worried, self-protective cohort in middle age, perpetually self-conscious, simultaneously terrified of and hungry for intense experience. Perhaps this is solely a metropolitan trait. For the sake of argument, we'll assume so.