The Decade of Desire by author Erin Somers: A Middle-Aged Adultery Story This Generation Needs.

Within the novel by Erin Somers The Ten Year Affair, the story centers on Cora, a millennial mother who craves a bygone kind of passion from a bygone kind of man. Unfortunately for her, morality in 2015 is rigid and cynical, so rather than embarking on the affair, Cora spends 10 years overthinking it, daydreaming of 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 fintech company. This novel positions itself as a comic take on the traditional tale of infidelity and a sharp satire of a particular, self-aware clique of economically slipping New Yorkers. It stands as the definitive narrative of middle-aged unfaithfulness our entire generation has coming: an energetic, clever critique of insufferable hand-wringers who’ve managed to ruin even sex.

A Portrait of Smug Unhappiness

Cora and her husband Eliot are smug, overeducated Brooklynites who, with rents rising and children growing, have relocated with hesitation upstate. Trapped by the “gruelling all-the-time-ness” of raising children, they juggle office careers, two children, and an ongoing fungal issue proliferating beneath their bathroom tiles which they cannot afford or muster the will to fix. Their social circle other smug, overeducated Brooklynites who have escaped the metropolis to drink negronis from rustic glassware and judge each other amidst a more rural setting. Yet Cora's isolation in this new environment, it stems not from her own critical, joyless perspective but because her suburban peers are “boring and self-absorbed, duller and vainer than they were back in the city”.

Eliot is intellectually lofty and utterly unaware. He eats popcorn while she cleans vigorously 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 forages for mushrooms. She deeply desires drama, 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 Over-Intellectualized Longing

The central conflict 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" (regarding her career, she claims, but really about everything). What she feels for Sam are “bland, liking-adjacent”. She wants “to get fucked into the astral plane and escape her own reality momentarily”. Yet, for a decade, Sam refuses while Cora pines. She imagines an alternate timeline alongside her real life, where instead of bills and school pickups, she has passion, luxury, and her imagined lover. When her fictional romance fizzles, 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, other than to be revered as a youthful bride, who’d died improbably of TB”.

A Sad Climax and Undercurrents

When they eventually succumb to their desires, the sex is sad, 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 “stoically eat[s] her out within their rented space” before dinner. The reader senses that Cora desires 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 no one tallies the cost.

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 has clenched his abs and ensured he was aroused, but failed to remove his casual footwear from the shot”. Given that the catalyst that killed their fun was having children, readers may fret about the impact these flawed adults have on their kids. When Cora’s daughter asks about sex, the adults fumble. They start with babies then concede that sex isn’t always about babies. Eliot mentions a penis then concedes that one isn’t required. Ultimately, he settles for, “you're aware of private parts?”

Underpinning the narrative flows a quiet theme of common existential queries of midlife: do our lives have meaning? Where do we go after death? These themes are more explicit in Cora’s imagined conversations. Considering these passages, the reader may ponder what lesson Cora and her jaded circle would take from their disappointing dramas. Might Cora become more open to life’s imperfect joys, its sentimental delights? When Eliot asks about her affair in the middle of a podcast about rope, Cora thinks “every serious exchange is undermined by its particulars”. Others could argue it's enriched. Yet that is not her nature, and the author refuses to grant the protagonist easy revelations, or force growth beyond her capacity.

A Final Appraisal

The result is an incisive, hilarious, exquisitely detailed novel, crafted with devastating precision. It is absolutely aware of itself, spare and brimming with subtext: a depiction of a worried, self-protective cohort entering midlife, chronically embarrassed, at once afraid of and desperate for sensation. Perhaps this is solely a metropolitan trait. Let’s say it is.