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In the novel by Erin Somers A Decade-Long Liaison, the story centers on a millennial mother named Cora, a woman in her prime who craves a type of romance from another era with a bygone kind of man. Unfortunately for her, the modern ethical landscape is inflexible and jaded, so rather than embarking on the affair, Cora spends 10 years overthinking it, fantasising about it and discussing it with the object of her desire, Sam – a playgroup dad who holds the title “head narrative architect” at a mortgage start-up. The book positions itself as a humorous twist on the classic adultery novel and a send-up of a narrow, self-conscious group of downwardly mobile New Yorkers. One could call it 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 Discontent

Cora and her husband Eliot are smug, overeducated Brooklynites who, as costs increased and their family expanded, have moved reluctantly upstate. Trapped by the “gruelling all-the-time-ness” of parenthood, they have office careers, a pair of kids, and a persistent mushroom growing under their bathroom tiles that they lack the energy and money to sort out. Their social circle other smug, overeducated Brooklynites who have fled the city to drink negronis out of mason jars and judge each other amidst a more rural setting. Yet Cora's isolation here, it stems not from her own critical, joyless perspective but because her new neighbours are “dull and vain, duller and vainer than they were back in the city”.

Her husband Eliot remains intellectually lofty and utterly unaware. He eats popcorn as she scrubs the oven and states he has no desire to own her. Cora imagines them attempting to endure a rustic life together, washing clothes on a stone while he searches for chanterelles. She longs for drama, a bit of depravity, a partner who will beg, and worship, and “growl at the feet of the woman’s excellence”.

"The shabbiness of real life, one must acknowledge its relentless predictability."

The Problem of High-Minded Desire

The central conflict is that Cora is just as intellectually constrained as her husband, and incapable of that kind of abandon herself. It’s “too much to ask her to be passionate” (regarding her career, she says, but really about everything). Her feelings for Sam are “bland, liking-adjacent”. She craves “to get fucked into the astral plane and not think about her life for a second”. Yet, for a decade, Sam demurs while Cora languishes. She imagines a parallel reality running concurrent to her actual existence, where in place of chores and errands, she has sex and hotels and Sam. As this fantasy dims, her mind conjures “a French guy named Baptiste” who teams up with Sam in assisting her from the tub, “nothing for her to do, no tasks, no obligations, other than to be revered as a youthful bride, tragically lost to illness”.

A Disappointing Climax and Deeper Themes

When they finally do give in to their desires, their intimacy is melancholy, without much play or complicity. It fails to be the sepia-toned romance she fantasized about for a full decade. Cora puts on a slinky dress and Sam “stoically eat[s] her out in their hotel room” before dinner. One imagines that Cora desires to slip inside a James Salter novel, where intimacy is messy and ambiguous, where imbalances of control exist, and everyone misbehaves, and no one tallies the cost.

Somers consistently suggests the core issue for Cora: she possesses a sharp tongue, but a profound lack of happiness. Regarding an intimate picture from Sam, Cora complains, “he tightened his stomach and made sure he was hard, but failed to remove his casual footwear from the shot”. Given that the catalyst that diminished their pleasure 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 begin with procreation then acknowledge that sex serves other purposes. The father references male anatomy then admits it is not essential. Ultimately, he settles for, “you're aware of private parts?”

Underpinning the narrative flows a quiet theme of familiar middle-age questions: is there purpose to our existence? Where do we go after death? These themes are more explicit in Cora's internal dialogues. Reading these exchanges, the reader may ponder what lesson Cora and her jaded circle would take from their unsatisfying escapades. Would Cora grow more open to life’s imperfect joys, its corny pleasures? Upon being questioned by Eliot about her affair during an audio program on bondage, Cora reflects “all meaningful communication is undermined by its particulars”. Others could argue it's enriched. Yet that is not her nature, and the author refuses to grant her character false epiphanies, or stretch her where she is unable to go.

A Final Appraisal

This is an incisive, uproariously funny, finely observed novel, crafted with devastating precision. It is profoundly self-aware, spare and brimming with subtext: a depiction of an anxious, loin-girding generation entering midlife, perpetually self-conscious, simultaneously terrified of and hungry for intense experience. Or maybe that’s just the New Yorkers. Let’s say it is.