The Ten Year Affair from author Erin Somers: A Midlife Infidelity Tale Our Generation Has Earned.

In Erin Somers’s A Decade-Long Liaison, the story centers on a millennial mother named Cora, a millennial mother who yearns for a type of romance from another era from a bygone kind of man. Unfortunately for her, morality in 2015 is inflexible and jaded, so rather than embarking on the affair, Cora spends a full decade obsessively analyzing it, fantasising about it and talking it over with her potential lover, Sam – a father from her child's circle who works as “chief storytelling officer” at a mortgage start-up. The book presents 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 definitive narrative of middle-aged unfaithfulness our entire generation deserves: an energetic, clever critique of unbearably anxious individuals who’ve managed to ruin even sex.

Depicting Self-Satisfied Discontent

Cora and her husband 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 “gruelling all-the-time-ness” of parenthood, they have office careers, two children, and a persistent mushroom 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 escaped the metropolis to drink negronis from rustic glassware and critique one another closer to nature. Yet Cora's isolation in this new environment, it stems not from her own critical, joyless perspective but because her new neighbours are “dull and vain, even more so than in their previous urban life”.

Her husband Eliot remains high-minded and oblivious. He eats popcorn as she scrubs the oven and says he doesn’t wish to possess her. In her mind, Cora pictures herself trying to survive a rustic life together, doing laundry by hand while he forages for mushrooms. She longs for drama, some moral abandon, a lover who will plead, and worship, and “express raw admiration for her prowess”.

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

The Problem of Over-Intellectualized Desire

The trouble is that Cora is just as intellectually constrained as her husband, and incapable of that kind of abandon herself. She finds it "an overwhelming request to feel fervor" (regarding her career, she says, but really about everything). Her feelings for Sam are “bland, liking-adjacent”. She craves “a transcendent physical experience and escape her own reality momentarily”. Yet, for a decade, Sam demurs while Cora pines. She constructs a parallel reality alongside her real life, where in place of chores and errands, she has sex and hotels and Sam. When her fictional romance fizzles, she imagines “a Gallic character called Baptiste” who teams up with Sam in assisting her from the tub, “nothing for her to do, no responsibilities, no obligations, except to be worshipped like someone’s teenage wife, tragically lost to illness”.

A Sad Climax and Deeper Themes

When they eventually succumb to their desires, the sex is sad, lacking in fun or mutual connection. It isn’t the sepia-toned romance she fantasized about for a full decade. Cora dons an alluring gown and Sam “performs oral sex with grim determination in their hotel room” before dinner. One imagines that Cora desires to inhabit a certain type of literary world, where intimacy is messy and ambiguous, where imbalances of control exist, and everyone misbehaves, and no one tallies the cost.

Somers consistently suggests the core issue for Cora: she has such cutting wit, but so little joy. Of Sam’s erotic photo, Cora critiques, “he tightened his stomach and ensured he was aroused, but has not cleared the frame of Crocs”. Since the event that diminished their pleasure was having children, readers may fret about the impact these flawed adults have on their kids. When Cora’s daughter asks about sex, the parents stumble. They start with babies then acknowledge that sex serves other purposes. Eliot mentions a penis then concedes that one isn’t required. Ultimately, he settles for, “you're aware of private parts?”

Beneath the story runs the subtle undercurrent of familiar middle-age questions: do our lives have meaning? Where do we go after death? These ideas are more directly explored in Cora’s imagined conversations. Considering these passages, the reader may ponder what lesson Cora and her jaded circle would take from their unsatisfying escapades. Might Cora become more receptive of life’s flawed pleasures, its sentimental delights? Upon being questioned by Eliot about her affair during an audio program on bondage, Cora thinks “every serious exchange is undermined by its particulars”. Others could argue it's enriched. Yet that is not her nature, and Somers doesn’t give the protagonist easy revelations, or stretch her where she is unable to go.

A Final Appraisal

This is a razor-sharp, uproariously funny, exquisitely detailed novel, crafted with such withering exactitude. It is profoundly self-aware, economical yet rich with implication: a depiction of an anxious, loin-girding generation entering midlife, chronically embarrassed, at once afraid of and desperate for sensation. Perhaps this is solely a metropolitan trait. For the sake of argument, we'll assume so.