The Ten Year Affair from author Erin Somers: The Midlife Infidelity Tale This Era Needs.

In the novel by Erin Somers A Decade-Long Liaison, we meet a millennial mother named Cora, a millennial mother who craves a type of romance from another era from a man of a different time. Unfortunately for her, the modern ethical landscape is rigid and cynical, and instead of having 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 positions 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 definitive narrative of middle-aged unfaithfulness this current cohort has coming: a propulsive, witty takedown of unbearably anxious individuals who’ve managed to ruin intimacy itself.

Depicting Smug Discontent

Cora and her husband Eliot are highly educated, somewhat arrogant former city dwellers who, as costs increased and their family expanded, have moved reluctantly upstate. Trapped by the “exhausting constant demands” of parenthood, they have office careers, a pair of kids, and a persistent mushroom proliferating beneath their bathroom tiles that they lack the energy and money to sort out. Their social circle similarly minded urban exiles who have fled the city to drink negronis from rustic glassware and judge each other closer to nature. Yet Cora's isolation in this new environment, it’s not because her fussy, lifeless lens 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 herself trying to survive with Eliot in the woods, washing clothes on a stone while he searches for chanterelles. She deeply desires excitement, a bit of depravity, a partner who will plead, and worship, and “growl at the feet of the woman’s excellence”.

"The shabbiness of real life, you had to admire its consistency."

The Problem of High-Minded Desire

The trouble is that she’s as high-minded and rigid as Eliot, and unable to surrender to primal passion. She finds it "an overwhelming request to feel fervor" (about work, she claims, 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 not think about her life for a second”. But, for years, Sam refuses while Cora languishes. She imagines a parallel reality 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 helping her out of the bath, “nothing for her to do, no tasks, no requirements, except to be worshipped as a youthful bride, who’d died improbably of TB”.

A Sad Climax and Undercurrents

When they eventually succumb to temptation, their intimacy is melancholy, without much play or complicity. It fails to be the nostalgically perfect affair she fantasized about for 10 years. Cora dons an alluring gown and Sam “performs oral sex with grim determination in their hotel room” prior to a meal. The reader senses that Cora desires to inhabit a James Salter novel, where sex is sordid and confusing, where the power dynamics are unequal, and characters act out, and nobody keeps score.

Throughout the novel the core issue for Cora: she has such cutting wit, but a profound lack of happiness. Of Sam’s erotic photo, Cora critiques, “he has clenched his abs and ensured he was aroused, but failed to remove his casual footwear from the shot”. Since the event that diminished their pleasure was having children, one worries about the impact these flawed adults have on their kids. When Cora’s daughter asks about sex, the parents stumble. They begin with procreation then acknowledge that sex isn’t always about babies. The father references male anatomy then admits it is not essential. Finally, he lands on, “you know genitals?”

Underpinning the narrative flows a quiet theme of familiar middle-age questions: is there purpose to our existence? What follows our final breath? These ideas are more directly explored in Cora’s imagined conversations. Reading these exchanges, one wonders what moral Cora and her cynical lot would derive from their disappointing dramas. Would Cora grow more receptive of life’s imperfect joys, its sentimental delights? When Eliot asks 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. But that’s not Cora, and the author refuses to grant her character false epiphanies, or force growth beyond her capacity.

A Final Assessment

This is an incisive, uproariously funny, exquisitely detailed novel, written 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. Or maybe that’s just the New Yorkers. Let’s say it is.