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Within Erin Somers’s A Decade-Long Liaison, the story centers on Cora, a woman in her prime who desperately wants a type of romance from another era with a bygone kind of man. Unfortunately for her, the modern ethical landscape is rigid and cynical, so rather than embarking on the affair, Cora spends 10 years overthinking it, fantasising about it and discussing it with her potential lover, Sam – a playgroup dad who holds the title “chief storytelling officer” at a mortgage start-up. This novel positions itself as a comic take on the classic adultery novel and a sharp satire of a particular, self-aware clique of downwardly mobile New Yorkers. It stands as the midlife adultery story our entire generation has coming: 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 upstate. Caught in the “exhausting constant demands” of raising children, they have office careers, two children, 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 critique one another amidst a more rural setting. But if Cora is lonely in this new environment, it stems not from her fussy, lifeless lens but because her new neighbours are “dull and vain, even more so than in their previous urban life”.

Her husband Eliot remains intellectually lofty and utterly unaware. He snacks casually while she cleans vigorously and says he doesn’t wish to possess her. Cora imagines them attempting to endure with Eliot in the woods, doing laundry by hand while he searches for chanterelles. She deeply desires drama, 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 Trouble with Over-Intellectualized Longing

The trouble is that Cora is just as intellectually constrained as her husband, and unable to surrender to primal passion. It’s “too much to ask her to be passionate” (regarding her career, she claims, but in truth, about all aspects of life). What she feels for Sam are “tepid, barely beyond simple fondness”. 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 an alternate timeline running concurrent to her actual existence, where instead of bills and school pickups, she has sex and hotels and Sam. As this fantasy dims, her mind conjures “a French guy named Baptiste” who teams up with Sam in helping her out of the bath, “nothing for her to do, no responsibilities, no requirements, other than to be revered as a youthful bride, tragically lost to illness”.

A Disappointing Climax and Deeper Themes

When they finally do give in to their desires, their intimacy is melancholy, 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 “performs oral sex with grim determination within their rented space” before dinner. The reader senses that Cora desires to slip inside a certain type of literary world, where intimacy is messy and ambiguous, 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 a profound lack of happiness. Regarding an intimate picture from Sam, Cora complains, “he tightened his stomach 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, one worries about the impact these flawed adults have on their kids. 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. Ultimately, he settles for, “you're aware of private parts?”

Underpinning the narrative runs the subtle undercurrent of common existential queries of midlife: do our lives have meaning? Where do we go after death? These ideas are more directly explored in Cora’s imagined conversations. Considering these passages, one wonders what lesson Cora and her jaded circle would derive from their unsatisfying escapades. Would Cora grow more receptive of life’s imperfect joys, its corny pleasures? When Eliot asks about her affair in the middle of a podcast about rope, Cora thinks “all meaningful communication is compromised by specific context”. Some might say enhanced. But that’s not Cora, and Somers doesn’t give the protagonist easy revelations, or force growth beyond her capacity.

An Ultimate Assessment

This is an incisive, uproariously funny, finely observed novel, written with such withering exactitude. It is profoundly self-aware, spare and brimming with subtext: a portrait of an anxious, loin-girding generation entering midlife, perpetually self-conscious, at once afraid of and desperate for sensation. Perhaps this is solely a metropolitan trait. For the sake of argument, we'll assume so.