The Decade of Desire from author Erin Somers: The Midlife Infidelity Story Our Era Has Earned.
In the novel by Erin Somers The Ten Year Affair, the story centers on Cora, a millennial mother 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, so rather than embarking on the affair, Cora spends 10 years obsessively analyzing it, fantasising about it and talking it over with the object of her desire, Sam – a playgroup dad who works as “head narrative architect” at a fintech company. The book presents itself as a humorous twist 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 insufferable hand-wringers who’ve somehow spoiled 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. Trapped by the “gruelling all-the-time-ness” of parenthood, they have office careers, a pair of kids, and a persistent mushroom proliferating beneath their bathroom tiles which they cannot afford or muster the will to fix. Their social circle similarly minded urban exiles who have escaped the metropolis to sip craft cocktails from rustic glassware and judge each other amidst a more rural setting. Yet Cora's isolation in this new environment, it’s not because her own critical, joyless perspective but because her suburban peers are “dull and vain, duller and vainer than they were back in the city”.
Eliot is high-minded and oblivious. He snacks casually as she scrubs the oven and states he has no desire to own her. Cora imagines them attempting to endure with Eliot in the woods, washing clothes on a stone while he forages for mushrooms. She deeply desires drama, some moral abandon, a lover who will beg, and worship, and “growl at the feet of the woman’s excellence”.
"The shabbiness of real life, one must acknowledge its relentless predictability."
The Trouble with Over-Intellectualized Desire
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" (regarding her career, she says, but in truth, about all aspects of life). Her feelings for Sam are “bland, liking-adjacent”. She craves “a transcendent physical experience and not think about her life for a second”. 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. 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 responsibilities, no requirements, except to be worshipped like someone’s teenage wife, tragically lost to illness”.
A Disappointing Conclusion and Undercurrents
When they finally do give in to temptation, the sex is sad, lacking in fun or mutual connection. It fails to be the sepia-toned romance she dreamed up for 10 years. Cora dons a slinky dress and Sam “performs oral sex with grim determination in their hotel room” before dinner. The reader senses that Cora wants to slip inside a certain type of literary world, where intimacy is messy and ambiguous, where the power dynamics are unequal, and everyone misbehaves, and nobody keeps score.
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 tightened his stomach and ensured he was aroused, but failed to remove his casual footwear from the shot”. Since the event that killed their fun was having children, 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 concede that sex serves other purposes. Eliot mentions a penis then concedes that one isn’t required. Ultimately, he settles for, “you know genitals?”
Underpinning the narrative flows a quiet theme of familiar middle-age questions: do our lives have meaning? What follows our final breath? These themes are more directly explored in Cora's internal dialogues. Reading these exchanges, one wonders what lesson Cora and her cynical lot would derive from their disappointing dramas. Might Cora become more open to life’s flawed pleasures, its corny pleasures? Upon being questioned by Eliot about her affair during an audio program on bondage, Cora reflects “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.
A Final Assessment
This is a razor-sharp, uproariously funny, exquisitely detailed novel, crafted with devastating precision. It is absolutely aware of itself, economical yet rich with implication: a portrait of an anxious, loin-girding generation in middle age, perpetually self-conscious, at once afraid of and desperate for sensation. Perhaps this is solely a metropolitan trait. Let’s say it is.