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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 craves a bygone kind of passion from a bygone kind of man. Unfortunately for her, morality in 2015 is rigid and cynical, so rather than embarking on the affair, Cora devotes a full decade obsessively analyzing it, daydreaming of it and discussing it with her potential lover, Sam – a playgroup dad who works as “chief storytelling officer” 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 particular, self-aware clique of economically slipping New Yorkers. One could call it the definitive narrative of middle-aged unfaithfulness our entire generation deserves: a propulsive, witty takedown of insufferable hand-wringers who’ve somehow spoiled even sex.

A Portrait of Self-Satisfied Unhappiness

The central couple, Cora and Eliot are highly educated, somewhat arrogant former city dwellers who, with rents rising and children growing, have moved reluctantly to the suburbs. Caught in the “gruelling all-the-time-ness” of raising children, they have 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 fled the city to sip craft cocktails out of mason jars and critique one another closer to nature. Yet Cora's isolation here, it stems not from her own critical, joyless perspective but because her new neighbours are “dull and vain, even more so than in their previous urban life”.

Eliot is intellectually lofty and utterly unaware. He snacks casually as she scrubs the oven and states he has no desire to own her. In her mind, Cora pictures herself trying to survive with Eliot in the woods, doing laundry by hand while he forages for mushrooms. She longs for excitement, a bit of depravity, a lover who will plead, and worship, and “express raw admiration for her prowess”.

"The mundane grind of everyday existence, one must acknowledge its relentless predictability."

The Trouble with High-Minded Longing

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” (about work, she says, but in truth, about all aspects of life). What she feels for Sam are “bland, liking-adjacent”. She wants “a transcendent physical experience and escape her own reality momentarily”. But, for years, Sam refuses while Cora languishes. She constructs an alternate timeline alongside her real life, 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, “nothing for her to do, no responsibilities, no obligations, except to be worshipped like someone’s teenage wife, who’d died improbably of TB”.

A Disappointing Climax and Deeper Themes

When they finally do give in to temptation, the sex is sad, without much play or complicity. It isn’t the nostalgically perfect affair she dreamed up for a full decade. Cora dons a slinky dress and Sam “stoically eat[s] her out within their rented space” before dinner. The reader senses that Cora desires to inhabit a certain type of literary world, where sex is sordid and confusing, where the power dynamics are unequal, and everyone misbehaves, and no one tallies the cost.

Throughout the novel the root of Cora’s problem: she has such cutting wit, but so little joy. Regarding an intimate picture from Sam, Cora complains, “he tightened his stomach and made sure he was hard, but has not cleared the frame of Crocs”. 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 concede 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?”

Beneath the story runs the subtle undercurrent of common existential queries of midlife: do our lives have meaning? Where do we go after death? These themes are more directly explored in Cora's internal dialogues. Considering these passages, the reader may ponder what moral Cora and her cynical lot would take from their disappointing dramas. Would Cora grow more open to life’s flawed pleasures, its corny pleasures? Upon being questioned by Eliot about her affair during an audio program on bondage, Cora reflects “every serious exchange is undermined by its particulars”. Some might say enhanced. Yet that is not her nature, and the author refuses to grant the protagonist easy revelations, or stretch her where she is unable to go.

A Final Appraisal

The result is a razor-sharp, hilarious, finely observed novel, written with such withering exactitude. It is absolutely aware of itself, spare and brimming with subtext: a portrait of an anxious, loin-girding generation entering midlife, chronically embarrassed, at once afraid of and desperate for sensation. Perhaps this is solely a metropolitan trait. Let’s say it is.