The Ten Year Affair by Erin Somers review – the midlife adultery story our generation deserves | Fiction
In Erin Somers’s The Ten Year Affair, Cora, a millennial mother, craves a bygone kind of passion from a bygone kind of man. Unfortunately for her, morality in 2015 is rigid and cynical, 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 is “chief storytelling officer” at a mortgage start-up (yes, that’s his job title. They all have absurd jobs). The book presents itself as a comic take on the classic adultery novel and a send-up of a narrow, self-conscious group of downwardly mobile New Yorkers. I’d call it the midlife adultery story our entire generation deserves: a propulsive, witty takedown of insufferable hand-wringers who’ve managed to ruin even sex. Honestly, I couldn’t put it down.
Cora and her husband Eliot are smug, overeducated Brooklynites who, with rents rising and children growing, have moved reluctantly upstate. Caught in the “gruelling all-the-time-ness” of parenthood, they have desk jobs, two children, a persistent mushroom growing under their bathroom tiles that they lack the energy and money to sort out. They hang out with other smug, overeducated Brooklynites who have fled the city to drink negronis out of mason jars and judge each other closer to nature. But if Cora is lonely here, it’s not because of her fussy, lifeless lens but because her new neighbours are “dull and vain, duller and vainer than they were back in the city”. 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 herself trying to survive with Eliot in the woods, washing clothes on a stone while he searches for chanterelles. 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 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 says, but really about everything). Her feelings for Sam are “bland, liking-adjacent”. She wants “to get fucked into the astral plane and not think about her life for a second”. (I mean, who doesn’t?) But, for years, Sam refuses while Cora pines. She imagines an alternate timeline alongside her real life, where instead of bills and school pickups, she has sex and hotels and Sam. When her fictional romance fizzles, she imagines “a French guy named Baptiste” who joins Sam in helping her out of the bath, “nothing for her to do, no tasks, no obligations, except to be worshipped like someone’s teenage wife, who’d died improbably of TB”.
I loved this razor-sharp, hilarious, finely observed novel, written with such withering exactitude
When they finally do give in to temptation, the sex is sad, without much play or complicity. It isn’t 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. One imagines that Cora wants to slip inside a James Salter novel, where sex is sordid and confusing, where the power dynamics are unequal, and everyone misbehaves, and nobody keeps score.
Throughout the novel, Somers hints at the root of Cora’s problem: she has such cutting wit, but so little joy. “The shabbiness of real life,” Cora thinks, “you had to admire its consistency.” Of Sam’s erotic photo, Cora complains, “he has clenched his abs and made sure he was hard, but has not cleared the frame of Crocs”. You’re not meant to look at the Crocs, Cora! Since the event that killed their fun was parenthood, one worries about what these idiots are doing to their children. When Cora’s daughter asks about sex, the adults fumble. 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 know genitals?”
Beneath the story 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 imagined conversations. Reading these exchanges, I wondered what lesson Cora and her cynical lot would take from their disappointing dramas. Would Cora grow more open to life’s imperfect joys, its corny pleasures? When Eliot asks 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 Somers doesn’t give her character false epiphanies, or stretch her where she is unable to go.
I loved this razor-sharp, hilarious, finely observed novel, written with such withering exactitude. It is absolutely aware of itself, spare and brimming with subtext: a portrait of an anxious, loin-girding generation in middle age, chronically embarrassed at ourselves, at once afraid of and desperate for sensation. Or maybe that’s just the New Yorkers. Let’s say it is.
Dina Nayeri’s novel A Happy Death is forthcoming in 2027. The Ten Year Affair by Erin Somers is published by Canongate (£18.99). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
