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In Erin Somers’s A Decade-Long Liaison, the story centers on a millennial mother named Cora, a millennial mother who yearns for a type of romance from another era with 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, daydreaming of it and discussing it with the object of her desire, Sam – a father from her child's circle who holds the title “head narrative architect” at a fintech company. The book positions 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 this current cohort deserves: an energetic, clever critique of insufferable hand-wringers who’ve somehow spoiled even sex.

Depicting Smug 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 parenthood, they juggle desk jobs, two children, and a persistent mushroom proliferating beneath 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. But if Cora is lonely here, it stems not from her fussy, lifeless lens but because her new neighbours are “boring and self-absorbed, even more so than in their previous urban life”.

Eliot is high-minded and oblivious. He snacks casually as she scrubs the oven and says he doesn’t wish to possess her. Cora imagines herself trying to survive a rustic life together, doing laundry by hand while he searches for chanterelles. She deeply desires drama, some moral abandon, a lover who will plead, and worship, and “express raw admiration for her prowess”.

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

The Problem of Over-Intellectualized Desire

The trouble is that she’s as high-minded and rigid as Eliot, and incapable of that kind of abandon herself. It’s “too much to ask her to be passionate” (about work, she claims, but really about everything). What she feels for Sam are “bland, liking-adjacent”. She wants “a transcendent physical experience and not think about her life for a second”. Yet, for a decade, Sam demurs while Cora pines. She constructs an alternate timeline alongside her real life, where instead of bills and school pickups, 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 assisting her from the tub, “nothing for her to do, no tasks, no requirements, except to be worshipped like someone’s teenage wife, tragically lost to illness”.

A Disappointing Climax and Deeper Themes

When they finally do give in to their desires, their intimacy is melancholy, lacking in fun or mutual connection. It isn’t the nostalgically perfect affair she fantasized about for 10 years. Cora puts on a slinky dress and Sam “stoically eat[s] her out within their rented space” before dinner. One imagines that Cora desires to inhabit a certain type of literary world, where intimacy is messy and ambiguous, where imbalances of control exist, and everyone misbehaves, and nobody keeps score.

Throughout the novel the core issue for Cora: she has such cutting wit, but so little joy. Regarding an intimate picture from Sam, Cora complains, “he has clenched his abs and made sure he was hard, but has not cleared the frame of Crocs”. Given that the catalyst that diminished their pleasure 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 acknowledge that sex isn’t always about babies. The father references male anatomy then concedes that one isn’t required. Ultimately, he settles for, “you know genitals?”

Beneath the story flows a quiet theme 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. Reading these exchanges, the reader may ponder what moral Cora and her jaded circle would take from their unsatisfying escapades. Would Cora grow more open to life’s flawed pleasures, its sentimental delights? Upon being questioned by Eliot about her affair during an audio program on bondage, Cora thinks “all meaningful communication 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 force growth beyond her capacity.

An Ultimate Appraisal

This is a razor-sharp, hilarious, exquisitely detailed novel, written with devastating precision. It is profoundly self-aware, spare and brimming with subtext: a depiction of an anxious, loin-girding generation in middle age, chronically embarrassed, simultaneously terrified of and hungry for intense experience. Or maybe that’s just the New Yorkers. For the sake of argument, we'll assume so.