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Within Erin Somers’s A Decade-Long Liaison, the story centers on a millennial mother named Cora, a millennial mother who craves a bygone kind of passion from a man of a different time. Sadly, for Cora, the modern ethical landscape is inflexible and jaded, and instead of having the affair, Cora devotes 10 years obsessively analyzing it, fantasising about it and talking it over with the object of her desire, Sam – a father from her child's circle who works as “head narrative architect” at a fintech company. The book positions itself as a humorous twist on the traditional tale of infidelity and a send-up of a narrow, self-conscious group of economically slipping New Yorkers. One could call it the definitive narrative of middle-aged unfaithfulness this current cohort has coming: a propulsive, witty takedown of insufferable hand-wringers who’ve somehow spoiled even sex.

A Portrait of Smug Discontent

Cora and her husband Eliot are smug, overeducated Brooklynites who, with rents rising and children growing, have moved reluctantly to the suburbs. Trapped by the “gruelling all-the-time-ness” of raising children, 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 escaped the metropolis to sip craft cocktails out of mason jars and judge each other closer to nature. Yet Cora's isolation here, it’s not because her own critical, joyless perspective but because her suburban peers are “dull and vain, even more so than in their previous urban life”.

Eliot is high-minded and oblivious. 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 searches for chanterelles. She deeply desires excitement, some moral abandon, a lover who will beg, and worship, and “growl at the feet of the woman’s excellence”.

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

The Problem of Over-Intellectualized Desire

The trouble 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). What she feels for Sam are “bland, liking-adjacent”. She craves “to get fucked into the astral plane and not think about her life for a second”. But, for years, Sam demurs while Cora pines. She constructs a parallel reality 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 joins Sam in assisting her from the tub, “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 their desires, their intimacy is melancholy, lacking in fun or mutual connection. It isn’t the nostalgically perfect affair she dreamed up 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 wants to inhabit a certain type of literary world, where sex is sordid and confusing, where imbalances of control exist, and everyone misbehaves, and no one tallies the cost.

Somers consistently suggests the root of Cora’s problem: she possesses a sharp tongue, but so little joy. Regarding an intimate picture from Sam, Cora complains, “he tightened his stomach and ensured he was aroused, but has not cleared the frame of Crocs”. Since the event that killed their fun 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 begin with procreation then acknowledge that sex serves other purposes. Eliot mentions a penis then admits it is not essential. Ultimately, he settles for, “you're aware of private parts?”

Beneath the story flows a quiet theme of familiar middle-age questions: is there purpose to our existence? Where do we go after death? These ideas are more directly explored in Cora's internal dialogues. Reading these exchanges, one wonders what moral Cora and her jaded circle would take from their disappointing dramas. Might Cora become 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 thinks “every serious exchange is compromised by specific context”. Some might say enhanced. But that’s not Cora, and Somers doesn’t give the protagonist easy revelations, or stretch her where she is unable to go.

A Final Appraisal

This is an incisive, hilarious, exquisitely detailed novel, written with such withering exactitude. It is profoundly self-aware, spare and brimming with subtext: 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.