The Decade of Desire from author Erin Somers: The Middle-Aged Infidelity Tale This Era Has Earned.
Within Erin Somers’s 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 with a bygone kind of man. Sadly, for Cora, the modern ethical landscape is inflexible and jaded, and instead of having the affair, Cora spends 10 years overthinking it, fantasising about it and discussing it with her potential lover, Sam – a playgroup dad who holds the title “chief storytelling officer” at a mortgage start-up. This novel presents itself as a comic take on the traditional tale of infidelity 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: a propulsive, witty takedown of insufferable hand-wringers who’ve somehow spoiled intimacy itself.
Depicting Self-Satisfied Unhappiness
The central couple, Cora and Eliot are highly educated, somewhat arrogant former city dwellers who, as costs increased and their family expanded, have relocated with hesitation to the suburbs. Trapped by the “exhausting constant demands” of parenthood, they juggle office careers, a pair of kids, and an ongoing fungal issue proliferating beneath their bathroom tiles which they cannot afford or muster the will to fix. They spend time with other smug, overeducated Brooklynites who have fled the city to sip craft cocktails out of mason jars and judge each other closer to nature. Yet Cora's isolation in this new environment, it’s not because her fussy, lifeless lens but because her new neighbours are “boring and self-absorbed, even more so than in their previous urban life”.
Her husband Eliot remains high-minded and oblivious. He snacks casually as she scrubs the oven and states he has no desire to own her. In her mind, Cora pictures herself trying to survive a rustic life together, doing laundry by hand while he searches for chanterelles. She longs for excitement, a bit of depravity, a lover who will beg, and worship, and “express raw admiration for her prowess”.
"The shabbiness of real life, one must acknowledge its relentless predictability."
The Trouble with 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 claims, but really about everything). What she feels 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”. But, for years, Sam demurs while Cora languishes. She constructs an alternate timeline alongside her real life, where in place of chores and errands, she has sex and hotels and Sam. When her fictional romance fizzles, her mind conjures “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, other than to be revered as a youthful bride, who’d died improbably of TB”.
A Sad Climax and Deeper Themes
When they finally do give in to their desires, their intimacy is melancholy, without much play or complicity. It fails to be the sepia-toned romance she dreamed up for a full decade. Cora dons an alluring gown and Sam “performs oral sex with grim determination within their rented space” before dinner. One imagines that Cora desires to inhabit a certain type of literary world, where intimacy is messy and ambiguous, 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 has such cutting wit, but a profound lack of happiness. 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 diminished their pleasure was having children, one worries about the impact these flawed adults have on their kids. As her daughter inquires about sex, the adults fumble. They begin with procreation then concede that sex isn’t always about babies. Eliot mentions a penis then admits it is not essential. Ultimately, he settles for, “you're aware of private parts?”
Beneath the story flows a quiet theme of familiar middle-age questions: is there purpose to our existence? What follows our final breath? These ideas are more explicit in Cora's internal dialogues. Reading these exchanges, one wonders what moral Cora and her jaded circle would take from their unsatisfying escapades. Would Cora grow more open to 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 “all meaningful communication is undermined by its particulars”. Others could argue it's enriched. But that’s not Cora, and the author refuses to grant her character false epiphanies, or stretch her where she is unable to go.
A Final Assessment
The result is an incisive, hilarious, finely observed novel, written with such withering exactitude. It is profoundly self-aware, economical yet rich with implication: a depiction of a worried, self-protective cohort entering midlife, perpetually self-conscious, simultaneously terrified of and hungry for intense experience. Perhaps this is solely a metropolitan trait. Let’s say it is.
