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Within the novel by Erin Somers A Decade-Long Liaison, we meet Cora, a millennial mother who craves a type of romance from another era with a bygone kind of man. Sadly, for Cora, morality in 2015 is rigid and cynical, so rather than embarking on the affair, Cora spends 10 years overthinking it, daydreaming of it and talking it over with the object of her desire, Sam – a playgroup dad who works as “chief storytelling officer” at a fintech company. The book presents itself as a comic take on the classic adultery novel and a sharp satire of a particular, self-aware clique of economically slipping New Yorkers. One could call it the midlife adultery story our entire generation deserves: an energetic, clever critique of insufferable hand-wringers who’ve somehow spoiled intimacy itself.

Depicting Smug Unhappiness

The central couple, Cora and Eliot are highly educated, somewhat arrogant former city dwellers who, as costs increased and their family expanded, have relocated with hesitation upstate. Caught in the “gruelling all-the-time-ness” of raising children, they juggle office careers, two children, and a persistent mushroom proliferating beneath 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 from rustic glassware 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 suburban peers are “boring and self-absorbed, even more so than in their previous urban life”.

Eliot is intellectually lofty and utterly unaware. He eats popcorn as she scrubs the oven and states he has no desire to own her. In her mind, Cora pictures herself trying to survive a rustic life together, doing laundry by hand while he forages for mushrooms. She deeply desires drama, some moral abandon, a lover who will plead, and worship, and “express raw admiration for her prowess”.

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

The Problem of High-Minded Longing

The central conflict is that she’s as high-minded and rigid as Eliot, and unable to surrender to primal passion. It’s “too much to ask her to be passionate” (about work, she claims, but really about everything). What she feels for Sam are “tepid, barely beyond simple fondness”. She craves “to get fucked into the astral plane and escape her own reality momentarily”. Yet, for a decade, Sam refuses while Cora pines. She imagines an alternate timeline alongside her real life, where in place of chores and errands, she has sex and hotels and Sam. As this fantasy dims, she imagines “a French guy named Baptiste” who teams up with Sam in assisting her from the tub, “leaving her with no duties, no tasks, no obligations, other than to be revered like someone’s teenage wife, who’d died improbably of TB”.

A Disappointing Climax and Undercurrents

When they finally do give in to temptation, their intimacy is melancholy, lacking in fun or mutual connection. It isn’t the nostalgically perfect affair she fantasized about for 10 years. Cora puts on an alluring gown and Sam “performs oral sex with grim determination in their hotel room” before dinner. The reader senses that Cora wants to inhabit a certain type of literary world, where sex is sordid and confusing, where imbalances of control exist, and characters act out, and no one tallies the cost.

Somers consistently suggests the root of Cora’s problem: she has such cutting wit, but a profound lack of happiness. Of Sam’s erotic photo, Cora complains, “he has clenched his abs and made sure he was hard, but failed to remove his casual footwear from the shot”. Since the event that killed their fun was parenthood, readers may fret about the impact these flawed adults have on their kids. When Cora’s daughter asks about sex, the parents stumble. They start with babies then acknowledge that sex isn’t always about babies. The father references male anatomy then concedes that one isn’t required. Finally, he lands on, “you're aware of private parts?”

Underpinning the narrative flows a quiet theme of familiar middle-age questions: do our lives have meaning? What follows our final breath? 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 derive from their disappointing dramas. Might Cora become more open to life’s imperfect joys, its sentimental delights? When Eliot asks about her affair during an audio program on bondage, Cora reflects “all meaningful communication is undermined by its particulars”. Some might say enhanced. Yet that is not her nature, and Somers doesn’t give the protagonist easy revelations, or force growth beyond her capacity.

An Ultimate Appraisal

The result is a razor-sharp, hilarious, exquisitely detailed novel, written with such withering exactitude. It is profoundly self-aware, economical yet rich with implication: a depiction of an anxious, loin-girding generation entering midlife, perpetually self-conscious, at once afraid of and desperate for sensation. Or maybe that’s just the New Yorkers. For the sake of argument, we'll assume so.