The Decade of Desire by Erin Somers: The Middle-Aged Adultery Tale Our Generation Has Earned.
Within Erin Somers’s The Ten Year Affair, we meet Cora, a millennial mother who craves a type of romance from another era with a bygone kind of man. Unfortunately for her, the modern ethical landscape is inflexible and jaded, so rather than embarking on 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 “head narrative architect” at a mortgage start-up. This novel positions itself as a comic take on the traditional tale of infidelity and a send-up of a particular, self-aware clique of economically slipping New Yorkers. One could call it the midlife adultery story this current cohort has coming: a propulsive, witty takedown of unbearably anxious individuals who’ve managed to ruin even sex.
Depicting Smug Discontent
The central couple, Cora and Eliot are highly educated, somewhat arrogant former city dwellers who, as costs increased and their family expanded, have moved reluctantly upstate. Caught in the “gruelling all-the-time-ness” of raising children, they have office careers, a pair of kids, and an ongoing fungal issue proliferating beneath 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 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 suburban peers are “dull and vain, even more so than in their previous urban life”.
Her husband Eliot remains high-minded and oblivious. He snacks casually while she cleans vigorously and states he has no desire to own 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 deeply desires drama, a bit of depravity, a lover who will plead, and adore, and “express raw admiration for her prowess”.
"The shabbiness of real life, one must acknowledge its relentless predictability."
The Trouble with Over-Intellectualized Longing
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 wants “a transcendent physical experience and escape her own reality momentarily”. Yet, for a decade, Sam demurs while Cora pines. She imagines an alternate timeline alongside her real life, where in place of chores and errands, she has passion, luxury, and her imagined lover. As this fantasy dims, her mind conjures “a Gallic character called Baptiste” who teams up with Sam in assisting her from the tub, “leaving her with no duties, no responsibilities, 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 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 a full decade. Cora puts on a slinky dress and Sam “performs oral sex with grim determination in their hotel room” before dinner. One imagines that Cora desires to slip inside a James Salter novel, where sex is sordid and confusing, where imbalances of control exist, and characters act out, and no one tallies the cost.
Throughout the novel the root of Cora’s problem: she possesses a sharp tongue, but so little joy. Regarding an intimate picture from Sam, Cora critiques, “he tightened his stomach and ensured he was aroused, but has not cleared the frame of Crocs”. Given that the catalyst that diminished their pleasure was parenthood, readers may fret about what these idiots are doing to their children. When Cora’s daughter asks about sex, the parents stumble. They start with babies then concede that sex isn’t always about babies. Eliot mentions a penis then admits it is not essential. Ultimately, he settles for, “you know genitals?”
Beneath the story flows a quiet theme of common existential queries of midlife: is there purpose to our existence? What follows our final breath? These themes are more explicit 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 receptive of life’s flawed pleasures, its corny pleasures? Upon being questioned by Eliot about her affair in the middle of a podcast about rope, Cora reflects “every serious exchange is compromised by specific context”. Some might say enhanced. But that’s not Cora, and Somers doesn’t give her character false epiphanies, or force growth beyond her capacity.
An Ultimate Assessment
This is a razor-sharp, uproariously funny, exquisitely detailed 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. Perhaps this is solely a metropolitan trait. Let’s say it is.
