Erin Somers's debut novel, The Ten Year Affair, offers a brutally witty and exquisitely observed dissection of millennial disillusionment, positioning itself as the definitive midlife adultery narrative for a chronically self-aware generation. Published by Canongate at £18.99, this is not a story of grand passion but a "propulsive, witty takedown" of those who manage to overthink and undermine even their most primal desires.
A Fantasy of Passion in a Cynical Age
The novel centres on Cora, a millennial mother trapped in the "gruelling all-the-time-ness" of parenthood. Having reluctantly moved from Brooklyn to upstate New York with her husband, Eliot, she finds herself surrounded by a similarly smug, overeducated set who judge each other over artisanal drinks. Cora yearns for a dramatic, depraved passion from a bygone era, fantasising about a lover who would "growl at the feet of the woman’s excellence".
Her target is Sam, a fellow parent with the absurd title of "chief storytelling officer" at a mortgage start-up. Yet, in the rigid, cynical moral landscape of 2015 as portrayed by Somers, Cora doesn't simply have an affair. Instead, she spends a decade overthinking, fantasising, and discussing the possibility with Sam, building an elaborate parallel life in her mind where hotel rooms replace school pickups.
The Shabbiness of Real Life
Somers masterfully contrasts Cora's sepia-toned fantasies with the grinding reality of her existence: a persistent mushroom under the bathroom tiles, a husband who eats popcorn as she cleans, and a social circle that is "dull and vain, duller and vainer than they were back in the city". The author's genius lies in exposing Cora's own complicity in her misery. She possesses a cutting wit but little capacity for joy, critiquing everything from Sam's erotic photo (noting the unsightly Crocs in the frame) to the "shabbiness of real life".
When the long-imagined consummation finally occurs, it is a sad, transactional event devoid of play or true connection. Sam "stoically eat[s] her out in their hotel room" before dinner, a far cry from the James Salter-esque, sordid romance Cora had scripted in her mind for ten years.
A Generation Chronicled with Withering Exactitude
Beneath the sharp comedy runs a deep undercurrent of middle-age anxiety. The novel quietly asks the big questions about life's meaning and what follows death, often through Cora's imagined conversations. Somers refuses to grant her characters false epiphanies. When confronted about the affair during a podcast about rope, Cora can only think that "every serious exchange is undermined by its particulars".
The review posits that the book is a portrait of an anxious, loin-girding generation, chronically embarrassed and simultaneously afraid of and desperate for sensation. It questions what such self-absorption means for the children of these characters, highlighted in a painfully awkward scene where Cora and Eliot fumble through a sex education talk, culminating in Eliot's helpless query: "you know genitals?"
Ultimately, The Ten Year Affair is celebrated as a spare, subtext-rich, and hilarious novel of immense self-awareness. It captures a specific slice of contemporary life with such withering exactitude that it feels both painfully familiar and brilliantly illuminating. As the reviewer concludes, it's a story our entire generation deserves—and one they likely won't be able to put down.
