The Ten Year Affair
Erin Somers
Simon & Schuster, 2025, $28
In The Ten Year Affair, Erin Somers focuses on the romantic intertwinings of several couples based in a lower Hudson Valley town with 16,000 residents. (Beacon, where Somers lives, has a population of 15,292.) The main character, Cora, has a job in marketing, working hybrid and splitting her time between New York City and home. She’s married to Eliot, a successful book publisher; they have two kids, Miles and Opal. Their move from New York City in the late 2010s was precipitated by the high cost of living, and it was paired with the wish to be closer to nature—both factors that will ring bells with many local readers.
At a baby group, Cora meets fellow parent Sam, and they bond instantly, sharing snark about other parents’ oddities—another mom’s mandate to make her child eat broccoli, and pee in front of the group, for instance. Sam does content marketing for dubious businesses and his distinguishing feature is chewing on cinnamon-flavored toothpicks (a habit that goes from insouciant to repulsive to Cora). Sam’s spouse, Jules, is a high-achieving lawyer who constantly belittles Sam. Despite (or because of?) these things, Cora finds him charming and open enough to imagine an affair with him. Cora and Sam aren’t the big earners in their respective families, leaving them with more child and home care responsibilities, but also less confidence and agency—until it comes to their burgeoning relationship. And inexorably, the two couples become closer, sharing lots of time together.
In a twist, Somers lays down another timeline, a parallel story close to reality, with some minor departures and embellishments. Cora and Sam meet for trysts in a soulless chain hotel a town over. Or do they? What begins as a sort of low-rent fantasy (and frankly, not much of a stretch of imagination, but no doubt that’s part of the trick) eventually cedes to real-life situations, fulfilling the drabness of the initial romantic daydream. When the pandemic hits, the two families decide to form a pod, forcing even more togetherness, for better or worse. The bond between clans extends to a group vacation to Cape Cod, providing additional opportunities for spontaneous trysts—possibly too many.
The book lightly skewers newcomers’ life in the Hudson Valley. Friends visiting for the first time arrive expecting “the country,” instead finding a rather unexciting exurbia still tethered to the Big Apple; they never visit again despite pledging so. The small town has an overpriced children’s’ clothing store, a dive bar, and a women’s book club that reads only boring classics. The mountains and river cradle the town; regular train whistles mark time and also remind people of their proximity to the city. Social life pretty much revolves around dinners with friends—one couple hosts, the others bring wine. (I question the relative absence in the narrative of farm-to-table feasts and periodic visits to the farmers’ market, which are so prevalent in the region.) Richard, Celeste, and their three kids move into the neighborhood, tossing more x-factors into the mix; they appear to have “real money,” enough to demand only fancy Japanese toilets for their renovation. Richard is a subtle flasher (he leaves the curtains open) and encourages damaging gossip involving himself and Jules, who in fact is having an affair with another man.
While some of the Hudson Valley lore rings true, I found myself puzzled at the abject anomie and fecklessness of the characters, who are on the whole unlikeable. Is their easy slide into amorality in part because of their relatively young ages (late 30s), and the unexpected tedium and repetition of child rearing? Their reliance on New York City as the source not only of lucre but to keep a toe in the competitive waters? All lean on drinking, drugs, and meds to salve whatever ails them, in addition to seeking extramarital affection. Even (or perhaps, especially) the high achievers have psychological issues; Eliot’s reliance on anti-depressants gives him erectile dysfunction, which is one factor in Cora seeking outside affection, and Jules’s type-A personality has her regularly threatening to kill her husband and purported best friend Cora. In fact, Jules and Cora physically fight in the pantry of their book club’s host—not over either’s infidelity, but because Cora’s mean-girl daughter won’t go to the dance with Jules’s smitten son.
Somers deftly flips between timelines, so much so that it’s easy to lose track of which narrative they’re in, but also, it doesn’t seem to matter…in fact very little seems to matter. She nails the aimlessness and basic questionable value of certain white-collar jobs in marketing, with their banal tasks and accompanying mediocre pay. And the pipeline of fresh faces from Brooklyn to the Hudson Valley is no myth. I just wish I cared more about the protagonists, and that their values were strong enough not to blow it all up—or not.
This article appears in October 2025.
