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In Erin Somers’s The Ten Year Affair, the story centers on Cora, a woman in her prime who desperately wants a bygone kind of passion from a man of a different time. Sadly, for Cora, the modern ethical landscape is rigid and cynical, and instead of having the affair, Cora spends a full decade overthinking it, fantasising about it and talking it over with her potential lover, Sam – a father from her child's circle who works as “chief storytelling officer” at a mortgage start-up. The book positions itself as a comic take on the traditional tale of infidelity and a send-up of a narrow, self-conscious group of downwardly mobile New Yorkers. One could call it the definitive narrative of middle-aged unfaithfulness this current cohort has coming: an energetic, clever critique of insufferable hand-wringers who’ve managed to ruin even sex.

A Portrait of Self-Satisfied Discontent

The central couple, Cora and Eliot are smug, overeducated Brooklynites who, as costs increased and their family expanded, have relocated with hesitation to the suburbs. Trapped by the “exhausting constant demands” of parenthood, they have 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 escaped the metropolis to drink negronis from rustic glassware and judge each other closer to nature. But if Cora is lonely in this new environment, it stems not from her own critical, joyless perspective 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 as she scrubs the oven and says he doesn’t wish to possess her. Cora imagines them attempting to endure a rustic life together, washing clothes on a stone while he forages for mushrooms. She deeply desires drama, some moral abandon, a lover who will plead, and adore, and “express raw admiration for her prowess”.

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

The Problem of Over-Intellectualized Desire

The central conflict is that she’s as high-minded and rigid as Eliot, and unable to surrender to primal passion. It’s “too much to ask her to be passionate” (about work, she says, but in truth, about all aspects of life). Her feelings for Sam are “bland, liking-adjacent”. She craves “to get fucked into the astral plane and not think about her life for a second”. Yet, for a decade, Sam refuses while Cora languishes. 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. As this fantasy dims, her mind conjures “a French guy named Baptiste” who joins 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, tragically lost to illness”.

A Sad Conclusion and Deeper Themes

When they finally do give in to temptation, their intimacy is melancholy, without much play or complicity. It fails to be the sepia-toned romance she dreamed up for 10 years. Cora puts on a slinky dress and Sam “stoically eat[s] her out in their hotel room” prior to a meal. The reader senses that Cora desires to slip inside a James Salter novel, where sex is sordid and confusing, where imbalances of control exist, and everyone misbehaves, and no one tallies the cost.

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”. Since the event that killed their fun was parenthood, one worries about the impact these flawed adults have on their kids. As her daughter inquires about sex, the parents stumble. They begin with procreation then acknowledge that sex serves other purposes. Eliot mentions a penis then admits it is not essential. Finally, he lands on, “you're aware of private parts?”

Underpinning the narrative runs the subtle undercurrent of familiar middle-age questions: is there purpose to our existence? Where do we go after death? These ideas are more directly explored in Cora’s imagined conversations. Reading these exchanges, the reader may ponder what moral Cora and her cynical lot would derive from their unsatisfying escapades. Would Cora grow more open to life’s flawed pleasures, its corny pleasures? When Eliot asks about her affair in the middle of a podcast about rope, Cora reflects “every serious exchange is compromised by specific context”. Others could argue it's enriched. But that’s not Cora, and Somers doesn’t give the protagonist easy revelations, or stretch her where she is unable to go.

A Final Appraisal

The result is a razor-sharp, uproariously funny, exquisitely detailed novel, crafted with devastating precision. It is profoundly self-aware, economical yet rich with implication: a portrait of an anxious, loin-girding generation entering midlife, chronically embarrassed, simultaneously terrified of and hungry for intense experience. Perhaps this is solely a metropolitan trait. For the sake of argument, we'll assume so.