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Within Erin Somers’s A Decade-Long Liaison, the story centers on Cora, a millennial mother who yearns for a bygone kind of passion with a bygone kind of man. Sadly, for Cora, morality in 2015 is rigid and cynical, and instead of having the affair, Cora spends a full decade obsessively analyzing it, daydreaming of it and discussing it with her potential lover, Sam – a playgroup dad who holds the title “chief storytelling officer” at a fintech company. The book positions itself as a humorous twist on the classic adultery novel 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: a propulsive, witty takedown of unbearably anxious individuals who’ve somehow spoiled even sex.

Depicting Smug Discontent

Cora and her husband Eliot are smug, overeducated Brooklynites who, as costs increased and their family expanded, have moved reluctantly to the suburbs. Caught in the “exhausting constant demands” of parenthood, they have office careers, two children, and an ongoing fungal issue growing under their bathroom tiles which they cannot afford or muster the will to fix. Their social circle other smug, overeducated Brooklynites who have escaped the metropolis to sip craft cocktails from rustic glassware and judge each other 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 “dull and vain, 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. Cora imagines them attempting to endure a rustic life together, doing laundry by hand while he searches for chanterelles. She longs for drama, a bit of depravity, a partner who will plead, and adore, and “growl at the feet of the woman’s excellence”.

"The shabbiness of real life, you had to admire its consistency."

The Trouble with Over-Intellectualized Longing

The trouble 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” (regarding her career, she says, but really about everything). Her feelings for Sam are “tepid, barely beyond simple fondness”. She wants “a transcendent physical experience and escape her own reality momentarily”. But, for years, Sam demurs while Cora pines. She imagines 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, her mind conjures “a Gallic character called Baptiste” who teams up with Sam in helping her out of the bath, “nothing for her to do, no responsibilities, no requirements, except to be worshipped like someone’s teenage wife, who’d died improbably of TB”.

A Sad Conclusion and Deeper Themes

When they eventually succumb to temptation, the sex is sad, lacking in fun or mutual connection. It isn’t the sepia-toned romance she fantasized about for a full decade. Cora dons a slinky dress and Sam “stoically eat[s] her out within their rented space” before dinner. One imagines that Cora desires to inhabit a James Salter novel, where sex is sordid and confusing, where the power dynamics are unequal, and everyone misbehaves, and nobody keeps score.

Somers consistently suggests 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 failed to remove his casual footwear from the shot”. Given that the catalyst that killed their fun was parenthood, readers may fret about what these idiots are doing to their children. When Cora’s daughter asks about sex, the adults fumble. They start with babies then acknowledge that sex isn’t always about babies. The father references male anatomy then admits it is not essential. Finally, he lands on, “you know genitals?”

Beneath the story runs the subtle undercurrent of common existential queries of midlife: is there purpose to our existence? What follows our final breath? These ideas are more explicit in Cora’s imagined conversations. Reading these exchanges, one wonders what moral Cora and her jaded circle would take from their disappointing dramas. Would Cora grow more open to 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 undermined by its particulars”. Others could argue it's enriched. 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

The result is an incisive, hilarious, exquisitely detailed novel, written with devastating precision. It is profoundly self-aware, spare and brimming with subtext: a portrait of an anxious, loin-girding generation in middle age, perpetually self-conscious, simultaneously terrified of and hungry for intense experience. Or maybe that’s just the New Yorkers. Let’s say it is.