A Decade-Long Liaison by author Erin Somers: The Middle-Aged Infidelity Story Our Generation Deserves.

Within the novel by Erin Somers The Ten Year Affair, we meet a millennial mother named Cora, a woman in her prime who yearns for a type of romance from another era 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 devotes a full decade obsessively analyzing it, daydreaming of it and talking it over with her potential lover, Sam – a playgroup dad who works as “chief storytelling officer” at a mortgage start-up. This novel presents itself as a humorous twist on the classic adultery novel and a sharp satire of a narrow, self-conscious group of economically slipping New Yorkers. It stands as the definitive narrative of middle-aged unfaithfulness our entire generation deserves: a propulsive, witty takedown of unbearably anxious individuals who’ve somehow spoiled intimacy itself.

Depicting Self-Satisfied Unhappiness

The central couple, Cora and Eliot are smug, overeducated Brooklynites who, as costs increased and their family expanded, have relocated with hesitation upstate. Trapped by the “exhausting constant demands” of raising children, they juggle desk jobs, a pair of kids, and a persistent mushroom proliferating beneath their bathroom tiles that they lack the energy and money to sort out. Their social circle other smug, overeducated Brooklynites who have fled the city to drink negronis from rustic glassware and critique one another closer to nature. But if Cora is lonely here, 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”.

Eliot is 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, a bit of depravity, a lover 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 Trouble with High-Minded 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 claims, but really about everything). What she feels 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 alongside her real life, where instead of bills and school pickups, she has passion, luxury, and her imagined lover. When her fictional romance fizzles, she imagines “a Gallic character called Baptiste” who teams up with Sam in assisting her from the tub, “leaving her with no duties, no responsibilities, no requirements, other than to be revered as a youthful bride, who’d died improbably of TB”.

A Disappointing Conclusion and Deeper Themes

When they finally do give in to their desires, their intimacy is melancholy, without much play or complicity. It isn’t the sepia-toned romance she dreamed up for a full decade. Cora dons a slinky dress and Sam “performs oral sex with grim determination in their hotel room” prior to a meal. One imagines that Cora wants to inhabit a certain type of literary world, where sex is sordid and confusing, where imbalances of control exist, and characters act out, and nobody keeps score.

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 has not cleared the frame of Crocs”. Given that the catalyst that diminished their pleasure was having children, one worries about what these idiots are doing to their children. When Cora’s daughter asks about sex, the parents stumble. They begin with procreation then concede that sex serves other purposes. The father references male anatomy then concedes that one isn’t required. Finally, he lands on, “you know genitals?”

Underpinning the narrative flows a quiet theme of familiar middle-age questions: do our lives have meaning? What follows our final breath? These themes are more directly explored in Cora’s imagined conversations. Considering these passages, the reader may ponder what moral Cora and her cynical lot would derive from their disappointing dramas. Might Cora become more open to life’s imperfect joys, its corny pleasures? Upon being questioned by Eliot about her affair during an audio program on bondage, Cora reflects “all meaningful communication is compromised by specific context”. Some might say enhanced. But that’s not Cora, and the author refuses to grant her character false epiphanies, or stretch her where she is unable to go.

An Ultimate Appraisal

The result 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 depiction of a worried, self-protective cohort in middle age, perpetually self-conscious, at once afraid of and desperate for sensation. Or maybe that’s just the New Yorkers. For the sake of argument, we'll assume so.