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In Erin Somers’s A Decade-Long Liaison, the story centers on a millennial mother named Cora, a woman in her prime who desperately wants a type of romance from another era with a man of a different time. Unfortunately for her, the modern ethical landscape is inflexible and jaded, and instead of having 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 holds the title “head narrative architect” at a mortgage start-up. This novel presents itself as a humorous twist on the traditional tale of infidelity and a send-up 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 unbearably anxious individuals who’ve somehow spoiled even sex.

Depicting Self-Satisfied Unhappiness

Cora and her husband Eliot are smug, overeducated Brooklynites who, with rents rising and children growing, have relocated with hesitation to the suburbs. 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 which they cannot afford or muster the will to fix. Their social circle similarly minded urban exiles who have fled the city to sip craft cocktails from rustic glassware and critique one another amidst a more rural setting. But if Cora is lonely here, it’s not because her own critical, joyless perspective but because her new neighbours are “boring and self-absorbed, 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 says he doesn’t wish to possess her. In her mind, Cora pictures them attempting to endure a rustic life together, doing laundry by hand while he forages for mushrooms. She longs for drama, some moral abandon, a lover who will beg, and adore, and “express raw admiration for her prowess”.

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

The Trouble with Over-Intellectualized Desire

The trouble 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 in truth, about all aspects of life). Her feelings for Sam are “bland, liking-adjacent”. She wants “to get fucked into the astral plane and escape her own reality momentarily”. But, for years, Sam demurs 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, her mind conjures “a French guy named Baptiste” who joins Sam in helping her out of the bath, “leaving her with no duties, no tasks, no obligations, other than to be revered as a youthful bride, who’d died improbably of TB”.

A Sad Conclusion and Undercurrents

When they eventually succumb to temptation, the sex is sad, lacking in fun or mutual connection. It fails to be 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” prior to a meal. One imagines that Cora desires to inhabit a James Salter novel, where intimacy is messy and ambiguous, where imbalances of control exist, and characters act out, and no one tallies the cost.

Throughout the novel the core issue for Cora: she has such cutting wit, but so little joy. 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 diminished their pleasure was having children, readers may fret about what these idiots are doing to their children. As her daughter inquires about sex, the parents stumble. They start with babies then concede that sex serves other purposes. The father references male anatomy then concedes that one isn’t required. Finally, he lands on, “you're aware of private parts?”

Beneath the story flows a quiet theme of familiar middle-age questions: is there purpose to our existence? What follows our final breath? These ideas are more directly explored in Cora's internal dialogues. Reading these exchanges, one wonders what moral Cora and her cynical lot would take from their disappointing dramas. Might Cora become more receptive of life’s flawed pleasures, its sentimental delights? Upon being questioned by Eliot about her affair during an audio program on bondage, Cora thinks “every serious exchange is compromised by specific context”. Others could argue it's enriched. But that’s not Cora, and Somers doesn’t give the protagonist easy revelations, or force growth beyond her capacity.

A Final Appraisal

This is an incisive, uproariously funny, exquisitely detailed novel, crafted with such withering exactitude. It is profoundly self-aware, economical yet rich with implication: a portrait of an anxious, loin-girding generation entering midlife, chronically embarrassed, simultaneously terrified of and hungry for intense experience. Perhaps this is solely a metropolitan trait. For the sake of argument, we'll assume so.