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Within the novel by Erin Somers The Ten Year Affair, the story centers on a millennial mother named Cora, a woman in her prime who desperately wants a type of romance from another era from a bygone kind of man. Unfortunately for her, the modern ethical landscape is rigid and cynical, and instead of having the affair, Cora devotes 10 years overthinking it, daydreaming of it and talking it over with her potential lover, Sam – a playgroup dad who holds the title “chief storytelling officer” at a fintech company. This novel 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. One could call it the midlife adultery story our entire generation has coming: a propulsive, witty takedown of insufferable hand-wringers who’ve managed to ruin intimacy itself.

Depicting Self-Satisfied Unhappiness

The central couple, Cora and 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, two children, and a persistent mushroom 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 fled the city 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 fussy, lifeless lens but because her suburban peers are “dull and vain, duller and vainer than they were back in the city”.

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 them attempting to endure a rustic life together, washing clothes on a stone while he searches for chanterelles. She longs for excitement, some moral abandon, a partner who will beg, and adore, and “express raw admiration for her prowess”.

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

The Problem of High-Minded Longing

The central conflict is that she’s as high-minded and rigid as Eliot, and incapable of that kind of abandon herself. She finds it "an overwhelming request to feel fervor" (about work, she says, but in truth, about all aspects of life). What she feels for Sam are “bland, liking-adjacent”. She wants “a transcendent physical experience and escape her own reality momentarily”. Yet, for a decade, Sam refuses while Cora languishes. She constructs an alternate timeline 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, she imagines “a French guy named Baptiste” who teams up with Sam in helping her out of the bath, “leaving her with no duties, no tasks, no requirements, except to be worshipped as a youthful bride, who’d died improbably of TB”.

A Sad 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 nostalgically perfect affair she dreamed up for 10 years. Cora puts on an alluring gown and Sam “stoically eat[s] her out in their hotel room” prior to a meal. One imagines that Cora wants to slip inside a certain type of literary world, where sex is sordid and confusing, where the power dynamics are unequal, and everyone misbehaves, and no one tallies the cost.

Throughout the novel the root of Cora’s problem: she has such cutting wit, but a profound lack of happiness. Regarding an intimate picture from Sam, Cora complains, “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, one worries about what these idiots are doing to their children. When Cora’s daughter asks about sex, the adults fumble. 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 flows a quiet theme of common existential queries of midlife: is there purpose to our existence? Where do we go after death? These themes are more explicit in Cora's internal dialogues. Reading these exchanges, one wonders what lesson Cora and her cynical lot would derive from their disappointing dramas. Would Cora grow more receptive of life’s imperfect joys, its sentimental delights? Upon being questioned by Eliot 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 the author refuses to grant her character false epiphanies, or force growth beyond her capacity.

An Ultimate Assessment

The result is an incisive, hilarious, finely observed novel, crafted with devastating precision. It is absolutely aware of itself, economical yet rich with implication: a depiction of an anxious, loin-girding generation 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.