The Ten Year Affair by Erin Somers
An affair mostly happens in a bored wife's mind in this interesting yet formally uninventive novel from Erin Somers
Cora lives in a sleepy little mountainside town, raising two chaotic young kids alongside her sadly unchaotic husband. Her life is comfortable, manageable and totally devoid of romance – until a man named Sam walks into it and she decides to have an affair.
Except not really. What makes Erin Somer’s The Ten Year Affair more than just another novel about a bored suburbanite trying to treat mid-life ennui with a dose of adultery is that Sam and Cora’s affair exists almost exclusively in her mind. She fantasises about the life she could be living while dealing with the one she’s got – dreaming up romantic getaways while fixing her daughter’s pick-up schedule or trying to figure out who to call about that mushroom growing on the bathroom wall.
This setup gives the novel plenty of room to ruminate on fantasy, reality and the messy way that they collide. And Cora is an enjoyable ruminator, full of amusing observations delivered in a detached style that makes The Ten Year Affair eminently readable. But the other characters are fairly flat and while the reality / fantasy split is an interesting conceit, the book never really commits to it – dipping into Cora’s imagined life here and there rather than taking a formal risk and really splitting itself in two. So we’re left sitting with Cora, wondering about what might have been.
