The Ten Year Affair by author Erin Somers: A Midlife Adultery Story This Era Has Earned.

Within Erin Somers’s A Decade-Long Liaison, the story centers on Cora, a millennial mother who craves a type of romance from another era from a man of a different time. Unfortunately for her, the modern ethical landscape is rigid and cynical, and instead of having the affair, Cora spends a full decade obsessively analyzing it, daydreaming of it and talking it over with the object of her desire, Sam – a playgroup dad who works as “head narrative architect” at a mortgage start-up. The book presents itself as a comic take on the traditional tale of infidelity and a sharp satire of a particular, self-aware clique of economically slipping New Yorkers. One could call it the definitive narrative of middle-aged unfaithfulness our entire generation deserves: a propulsive, witty takedown of unbearably anxious individuals who’ve managed to ruin even sex.

Depicting Self-Satisfied Unhappiness

Cora and her husband Eliot are smug, overeducated Brooklynites who, with rents rising and children growing, have moved reluctantly upstate. Caught in the “exhausting constant demands” 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. They spend time with similarly minded urban exiles who have fled the city to drink negronis out of mason jars and critique one another amidst a more rural setting. Yet Cora's isolation here, it stems not from her fussy, lifeless lens but because her suburban peers are “dull and vain, even more so than in their previous urban life”.

Eliot is high-minded and oblivious. He eats popcorn as she scrubs the oven and says he doesn’t wish to possess her. Cora imagines them attempting to endure with Eliot in the woods, washing clothes on a stone while he forages for mushrooms. She longs for drama, a bit of depravity, a lover who will beg, and worship, and “growl at the feet of the woman’s excellence”.

"The shabbiness of real life, one must acknowledge its relentless predictability."

The Trouble with High-Minded Desire

The trouble is that she’s as high-minded and rigid as Eliot, and incapable of that kind of abandon herself. It’s “too much to ask her to be passionate” (about work, she claims, but in truth, about all aspects of life). Her feelings for Sam are “tepid, barely beyond simple fondness”. 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 pines. 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 Gallic character called Baptiste” who joins Sam in assisting her from the tub, “nothing for her to do, no tasks, no requirements, except to be worshipped like someone’s teenage wife, who’d died improbably of TB”.

A Disappointing Conclusion and Undercurrents

When they eventually succumb to temptation, their intimacy is melancholy, without much play or complicity. It fails to be the nostalgically perfect affair she fantasized about for 10 years. Cora dons an alluring gown and Sam “stoically eat[s] her out in their hotel room” prior to a meal. The reader senses that Cora wants to slip inside a James Salter novel, where intimacy is messy and ambiguous, where the power dynamics are unequal, and characters act out, and nobody keeps score.

Somers consistently suggests the root of Cora’s problem: she possesses a sharp tongue, but so little joy. 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 killed their fun was having children, readers may fret about the impact these flawed adults have on their kids. As her daughter inquires about sex, the parents stumble. They begin with procreation then concede that sex isn’t always about babies. Eliot mentions a penis then concedes that one isn’t required. Finally, he lands on, “you know genitals?”

Underpinning the narrative 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 internal dialogues. Considering these passages, the reader may ponder 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? When Eliot asks about her affair during an audio program on bondage, Cora thinks “all meaningful communication is undermined by its particulars”. Some might say enhanced. Yet that is not her nature, and Somers doesn’t give her character false epiphanies, or stretch her where she is unable to go.

A Final Assessment

This is an incisive, hilarious, exquisitely detailed novel, written with such withering exactitude. It is profoundly self-aware, spare and brimming with subtext: a portrait of an anxious, loin-girding generation entering midlife, perpetually self-conscious, simultaneously terrified of and hungry for intense experience. Or maybe that’s just the New Yorkers. For the sake of argument, we'll assume so.