A Decade-Long Liaison by Erin Somers: A Midlife Adultery Story Our Era Has Earned.
In the novel by Erin Somers The Ten Year Affair, the story centers on 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 inflexible and jaded, and instead of having the affair, Cora spends 10 years obsessively analyzing it, daydreaming of it and discussing it with her potential lover, Sam – a father from her child's circle who holds the title “head narrative architect” at a mortgage start-up. The book presents itself as a comic take on the traditional tale of infidelity and a send-up of a particular, self-aware clique of downwardly mobile New Yorkers. One could call it the midlife adultery story this current cohort deserves: an energetic, clever critique of unbearably anxious individuals who’ve somehow spoiled intimacy itself.
A Portrait of Smug Discontent
Cora and her husband Eliot are highly educated, somewhat arrogant former city dwellers who, with rents rising and children growing, have relocated with hesitation to the suburbs. Trapped by the “gruelling all-the-time-ness” of parenthood, they juggle office careers, a pair of kids, and an ongoing fungal issue growing under their bathroom tiles that they lack the energy and money to sort out. They spend time with similarly minded urban exiles who have fled the city to sip craft cocktails out of mason jars and critique one another closer to nature. But if Cora is lonely in this new environment, it’s not because her fussy, lifeless lens but because her suburban peers are “boring and self-absorbed, even more so than in their previous urban life”.
Her husband Eliot remains intellectually lofty and utterly unaware. He snacks casually as she scrubs the oven and says he doesn’t wish to possess her. In her mind, Cora pictures them attempting to endure with Eliot in the woods, washing clothes on a stone while he forages for mushrooms. She longs for excitement, some moral abandon, 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 Desire
The central conflict 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" (about work, she says, but in truth, about all aspects of life). What she feels for Sam are “tepid, barely beyond simple fondness”. She wants “a transcendent physical experience and escape her own reality momentarily”. Yet, for a decade, 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 sex and hotels and Sam. As this fantasy dims, her mind conjures “a Gallic character called Baptiste” who teams up with Sam in helping her out of the bath, “nothing for her to do, no tasks, no obligations, other than to be revered like someone’s teenage wife, who’d died improbably of TB”.
A Sad Conclusion and Deeper Themes
When they eventually succumb to their desires, their intimacy is melancholy, lacking in fun or mutual connection. It fails to be the sepia-toned romance she dreamed up for 10 years. Cora puts on a slinky dress and Sam “stoically eat[s] her out in their hotel room” before dinner. The reader senses that Cora wants to slip inside a certain type of literary world, where sex is sordid and confusing, 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 a profound lack of happiness. Regarding an intimate picture from Sam, Cora complains, “he tightened his stomach and ensured he was aroused, but has not cleared the frame of Crocs”. Since the event 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 begin with procreation then acknowledge that sex serves other purposes. The father references male anatomy then admits it is not essential. 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 moral Cora and her cynical lot would take from their unsatisfying escapades. Might Cora become 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 thinks “every serious exchange is undermined by its particulars”. Some might say enhanced. But that’s not Cora, and the author refuses to grant the protagonist easy revelations, or force growth beyond her capacity.
An Ultimate Assessment
This is a razor-sharp, hilarious, finely observed novel, written with devastating precision. It is profoundly self-aware, spare and brimming with subtext: a portrait of an anxious, loin-girding generation entering midlife, chronically embarrassed, simultaneously terrified of and hungry for intense experience. Or maybe that’s just the New Yorkers. Let’s say it is.