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Within the novel by Erin Somers A Decade-Long Liaison, the story centers on a millennial mother named Cora, a millennial mother who desperately wants a type of romance from another era with a man of a different time. Sadly, for Cora, the modern ethical landscape is inflexible and jaded, and instead of having the affair, Cora spends a full decade obsessively analyzing it, fantasising about it and discussing it with her potential lover, Sam – a playgroup dad who works as “head narrative architect” at a mortgage start-up. This novel presents itself as a comic take on the traditional tale of infidelity and a sharp satire of a narrow, self-conscious group of downwardly mobile New Yorkers. It stands as the midlife adultery story our entire generation has coming: an energetic, clever critique of insufferable hand-wringers who’ve somehow spoiled intimacy itself.

Depicting Smug Unhappiness

Cora and her husband Eliot are smug, overeducated Brooklynites who, as costs increased and their family expanded, have relocated with hesitation to the suburbs. Trapped by the “exhausting constant demands” of parenthood, they juggle office careers, a pair of kids, and an ongoing fungal issue growing under their bathroom tiles that they lack the energy and money to sort out. Their social circle other smug, overeducated Brooklynites who have escaped the metropolis to sip craft cocktails out of mason jars and critique one another closer to nature. But if Cora is lonely in this new environment, 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”.

Eliot is intellectually lofty and utterly unaware. He eats popcorn as she scrubs the oven and states he has no desire to own her. Cora imagines herself trying to survive a rustic life together, washing clothes on a stone while he forages for mushrooms. She longs for excitement, a bit of depravity, a lover who will plead, and adore, and “growl at the feet of the woman’s excellence”.

"The mundane grind of everyday existence, you had to admire its consistency."

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. She finds it "an overwhelming request to feel fervor" (regarding her career, she claims, but really about everything). What she feels for Sam are “bland, liking-adjacent”. She wants “a transcendent physical experience and not think about her life for a second”. But, for years, Sam refuses while Cora languishes. She constructs a parallel reality running concurrent to her actual existence, where instead of bills and school pickups, she has sex and hotels and Sam. When her fictional romance fizzles, she imagines “a French guy named Baptiste” who joins Sam in assisting her from the tub, “leaving her with no duties, no tasks, no obligations, except to be worshipped like someone’s teenage wife, who’d died improbably of TB”.

A Sad Climax and Undercurrents

When they eventually succumb to their desires, their intimacy is melancholy, without much play or complicity. It isn’t the nostalgically perfect affair she fantasized about for 10 years. Cora dons a slinky dress and Sam “stoically eat[s] her out within their rented space” before dinner. The reader senses that Cora wants to slip inside a certain type of literary world, where intimacy is messy and ambiguous, where imbalances of control exist, and characters act out, 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. Of Sam’s erotic photo, Cora critiques, “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, one worries about the impact these flawed adults have on their kids. As her daughter inquires about sex, the adults fumble. They start with babies then concede that sex serves other purposes. Eliot mentions a penis then concedes that one isn’t required. Finally, he lands on, “you're aware of private parts?”

Underpinning the narrative runs the subtle undercurrent of familiar middle-age questions: do our lives have meaning? Where do we go after death? These themes are more explicit in Cora’s imagined conversations. Reading these exchanges, the reader may ponder what moral Cora and her cynical lot would take from their unsatisfying escapades. Might Cora become more receptive of life’s imperfect joys, its sentimental delights? When Eliot asks about her affair during an audio program on bondage, Cora thinks “all meaningful communication is compromised by specific context”. Some might say enhanced. 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.

An Ultimate Assessment

The result is a razor-sharp, hilarious, finely observed novel, crafted with such withering exactitude. It is absolutely aware of itself, spare and brimming with subtext: a portrait of a worried, self-protective cohort 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.