Literature and cinema have long framed infidelity as the realm of complex people, those seduced by ambition, power, or erotic excess, fleeing from spouses appearing dull by comparison or committing abuse. Erin Somers’s The Ten Year Affair resists that over used theme. Its protagonists are noticeable for their ordinariness. Like the ordinary characters played by Robert De Niro and Meryl Streep in the classic film “Falling in Love”, a story of two random commuters who always meet on the train, the book’s leading characters Cora and Sam are neighbors who are as any other normal homeowners.
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Cora is a mother of two, stalled in a job beneath her capacities, married to Eliot, a man full of dreams and emotionally generous husband whose very chill demeanor invites room for deceit. Sam, married to the driven and career woman Jules, is similarly unremarkable. Their affair is not born of grand passion but of domestic fatigue: the dull ache of routines perfected inside the household and the schools of their children and personal desires and dreams put to the side.
The Ten Year Affair follows our millennial foursome characters (Sam and Eliot celebrated their 40th birthdays sometime after the pandemic) through their friendship, closeness to each other in a country town a couple of hours away from New York City, and years of unspoken longing.
The novel takes us on a journey as Cora and Sam, drawn together through shared domestic tasks of mostly working from home and being active parents in the children’s school lives, beginning a relationship that blossoms slowly in real life and fast-paced in the imaginary world. As time passes, parallel versions of their lives - one imagined, one real - begin to combine, forcing choices that test loyalty, responsibility, and the cost of desire acted upon.
Somers introduces a “sliding doors” structure early through the novel, contrasting fantasy and actuality. When the imagined life proves more complicated than the real one because of the affair, the book takes a turn as the real world becomes where the true infidelity happens. The affair’s emotional consequences, particularly for Cora, are rendered with restraint rather than melodrama. Sam’s moral stonewalling, meanwhile, is as infuriating as it gets. His instinct to preserve his marriage while abandoning Cora's own dilemma in being the other half of the affair, leaves the reader feeling that he ultimately earns the ending he receives.
Claims that the novel rivals Madame Bovary as one of the best book about having an affair is a stretch of the imagination. Still, Somers delivers something direct and perhaps equally unsettling: a study of marriage not as romance gone sour, but as endurance tested by exhaustion, parenthood, economic pressure and the temptation to believe that life might feel fuller with someone else, even within an otherwise non-toxic marriage.
If you’re not in a toxic relationship, I guess, then don’t play games, as the novel would want to convey.
★★½
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