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In Erin Somers’s A Decade-Long Liaison, we meet a millennial mother named Cora, a woman in her prime who desperately wants a bygone kind of passion from a bygone kind of man. Sadly, for Cora, morality in 2015 is rigid and cynical, and instead of having 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 “head narrative architect” at a fintech company. This novel presents itself as a comic take on the classic adultery novel and a sharp satire of a particular, self-aware clique of economically slipping 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 intimacy itself.

Depicting Smug Discontent

The central couple, Cora and Eliot are smug, overeducated Brooklynites who, as costs increased and their family expanded, have relocated with hesitation upstate. Caught in the “exhausting constant demands” of parenthood, they have desk jobs, two children, and a persistent mushroom growing under their bathroom tiles that they lack the energy and money to sort out. Their social circle similarly minded urban exiles who have escaped the metropolis to drink negronis out of mason jars and critique one another closer to nature. But if Cora is lonely in this new environment, it’s not because her own critical, joyless perspective but because her new neighbours are “boring and self-absorbed, duller and vainer than they were back in the city”.

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 them attempting to endure with Eliot in the woods, doing laundry by hand while he searches for chanterelles. She longs for excitement, a bit of depravity, a lover who will beg, and adore, and “express raw admiration for her prowess”.

"The shabbiness of real life, one must acknowledge its relentless predictability."

The Trouble with Over-Intellectualized Desire

The trouble is that she’s as high-minded and rigid as Eliot, and unable to surrender to primal passion. She finds it "an overwhelming request to feel fervor" (about work, she claims, but really about everything). What she feels for Sam are “tepid, barely beyond simple fondness”. She craves “a transcendent physical experience and not think about her life for a second”. Yet, for a decade, Sam demurs while Cora pines. She constructs a parallel reality running concurrent to her actual existence, where instead of bills and school pickups, she has sex and hotels and Sam. When her fictional romance fizzles, she imagines “a Gallic character called Baptiste” who teams up with Sam in assisting her from the tub, “leaving her with no duties, no tasks, no requirements, except to be worshipped like someone’s teenage wife, who’d died improbably of TB”.

A Sad Conclusion and Undercurrents

When they finally do give in to temptation, their intimacy is melancholy, lacking in fun or mutual connection. It fails to be the nostalgically perfect affair she fantasized about for a full decade. Cora puts on an alluring gown and Sam “performs oral sex with grim determination within their rented space” prior to a meal. The reader senses that Cora wants to inhabit a certain type of literary world, where sex is sordid and confusing, where imbalances of control exist, and characters act out, and nobody keeps score.

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 ensured he was aroused, but has not cleared the frame of Crocs”. Since the event that diminished their pleasure was parenthood, readers may fret about what these idiots are doing to their children. As her daughter inquires about sex, the adults fumble. They start with babies then acknowledge 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 familiar middle-age questions: do our lives have meaning? Where do we go after death? These themes are more explicit in Cora’s imagined conversations. Considering these passages, 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”. Others could argue it's enriched. But that’s not Cora, and the author refuses to grant her character false epiphanies, or stretch her where she is unable to go.

An Ultimate Assessment

The result is a razor-sharp, uproariously funny, exquisitely detailed novel, written with devastating precision. It is profoundly self-aware, economical yet rich with implication: a portrait of a worried, self-protective cohort entering midlife, perpetually self-conscious, at once afraid of and desperate for sensation. Or maybe that’s just the New Yorkers. Let’s say it is.