The Ten Year Affair from Erin Somers: The Middle-Aged Infidelity Story Our Generation Has Earned.

Within the novel by Erin Somers A Decade-Long Liaison, we meet Cora, a woman in her prime who yearns for a bygone kind of passion from a man of a different time. Unfortunately for her, morality in 2015 is rigid and cynical, so rather than embarking on the affair, Cora devotes 10 years overthinking it, fantasising about it and discussing it with the object of her desire, Sam – a father from her child's circle who holds the title “chief storytelling officer” at a mortgage start-up. The book positions itself as a comic take on the classic adultery novel and a sharp satire of a narrow, self-conscious group of downwardly mobile New Yorkers. It stands as the definitive narrative of middle-aged unfaithfulness this current cohort deserves: an energetic, clever critique of unbearably anxious individuals who’ve somehow spoiled 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 upstate. Caught in the “exhausting constant demands” of parenthood, they juggle desk jobs, a pair of kids, and an ongoing fungal issue growing under their bathroom tiles that they lack the energy and money to sort out. Their social circle similarly minded urban exiles who have escaped the metropolis to drink negronis from rustic glassware and judge each other amidst a more rural setting. But if Cora is lonely in this new environment, it stems not from her own critical, joyless perspective but because her new neighbours are “boring and self-absorbed, even more so than in their previous urban life”.

Eliot is intellectually lofty and utterly unaware. He snacks casually while she cleans vigorously and states he has no desire to own her. In her mind, Cora pictures herself trying to survive with Eliot in the woods, doing laundry by hand while he forages for mushrooms. She deeply desires drama, some moral abandon, a partner who will plead, and adore, and “growl at the feet of the woman’s excellence”.

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

The Problem of High-Minded Desire

The central conflict 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 in truth, about all aspects of life). Her feelings for Sam are “tepid, barely beyond simple fondness”. She wants “a transcendent physical experience and not think about her life for a second”. But, for years, Sam demurs while Cora languishes. She imagines a parallel reality running concurrent to her actual existence, where in place of chores and errands, she has passion, luxury, and her imagined lover. When her fictional romance fizzles, her mind conjures “a Gallic character called Baptiste” who teams up with Sam in helping her out of the bath, “leaving her with no duties, no tasks, no requirements, other than to be revered as a youthful bride, who’d died improbably of TB”.

A Disappointing Climax and Undercurrents

When they eventually succumb to their desires, the sex is sad, without much play or complicity. It isn’t the sepia-toned romance she fantasized about for a full decade. Cora puts on a slinky dress and Sam “performs oral sex with grim determination in their hotel room” prior to a meal. The reader senses that Cora wants to inhabit 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 root of Cora’s problem: she possesses a sharp tongue, but a profound lack of happiness. Of Sam’s erotic photo, Cora complains, “he has clenched his abs and ensured he was aroused, but has not cleared the frame of Crocs”. Given that the catalyst that killed their fun 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 acknowledge that sex isn’t always about babies. Eliot mentions a penis then concedes that one isn’t required. Finally, he lands on, “you're aware of private parts?”

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. Considering these passages, the reader may ponder what moral Cora and her jaded circle would derive from their unsatisfying escapades. Might Cora become more receptive of life’s imperfect joys, its sentimental delights? Upon being questioned by Eliot about her affair during an audio program on bondage, Cora thinks “all meaningful communication is undermined by its particulars”. Others could argue it's enriched. Yet that is not her nature, and the author refuses to grant her character false epiphanies, or stretch her where she is unable to go.

An Ultimate Assessment

This 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 a worried, self-protective cohort in middle age, chronically embarrassed, simultaneously terrified of and hungry for intense experience. Perhaps this is solely a metropolitan trait. Let’s say it is.