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Within the novel by Erin Somers 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 bygone kind of man. Unfortunately for her, the modern ethical landscape is rigid and cynical, and instead of having the affair, Cora spends 10 years overthinking it, fantasising about it and talking it over with her potential lover, Sam – a playgroup dad who works as “head narrative architect” at a fintech company. The book presents itself as a humorous twist on the classic adultery novel and a sharp satire of a narrow, self-conscious group of downwardly mobile New Yorkers. One could call it the midlife adultery story this current cohort deserves: a propulsive, witty takedown of insufferable hand-wringers who’ve somehow spoiled even sex.

Depicting Self-Satisfied Unhappiness

The central couple, Cora and Eliot are highly educated, somewhat arrogant former city dwellers who, with rents rising and children growing, have relocated with hesitation to the suburbs. Caught in the “gruelling all-the-time-ness” of parenthood, they juggle desk jobs, a pair of kids, and a persistent mushroom proliferating beneath their bathroom tiles that they lack the energy and money to sort out. They spend time with other smug, overeducated Brooklynites who have escaped the metropolis to drink negronis out of mason jars and judge each other amidst a more rural setting. But if Cora is lonely in this new environment, it stems not from her own critical, joyless perspective but because her suburban peers are “boring and self-absorbed, duller and vainer than they were back in the city”.

Eliot is intellectually lofty and utterly unaware. He eats popcorn 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 longs for excitement, a bit of depravity, a partner who will beg, and adore, and “express raw admiration for her prowess”.

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

The Problem of 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” (about work, she says, 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 escape her own reality momentarily”. But, for years, Sam refuses while Cora pines. She imagines 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 French guy named Baptiste” who joins Sam in helping her out of the bath, “nothing for her to do, no responsibilities, no obligations, other than to be revered like someone’s teenage wife, tragically lost to illness”.

A Disappointing Conclusion and Deeper Themes

When they eventually succumb to temptation, the sex is sad, without much play or complicity. It fails to be the nostalgically perfect affair she fantasized about for a full decade. Cora puts on a slinky dress and Sam “stoically eat[s] her out within their rented space” prior to a meal. The reader senses that Cora desires to slip inside a James Salter novel, where sex is sordid and confusing, 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. Of Sam’s erotic photo, Cora critiques, “he has clenched his abs and made sure he was hard, but failed to remove his casual footwear from the shot”. Since the event that diminished their pleasure was parenthood, one worries about what these idiots are doing to their children. As her daughter inquires about sex, the parents stumble. They begin with procreation then concede that sex serves other purposes. Eliot mentions a penis then concedes that one isn’t required. Finally, he lands on, “you know genitals?”

Underpinning the narrative runs the subtle undercurrent of common existential queries of midlife: 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 cynical lot would derive from their disappointing dramas. Would Cora grow more open to life’s imperfect joys, its sentimental delights? When Eliot asks 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. Yet that is not her nature, and the author refuses to grant her character false epiphanies, or force growth beyond her capacity.

A Final Appraisal

The result is an incisive, uproariously funny, finely observed novel, written with such withering exactitude. It is absolutely aware of itself, spare and brimming with subtext: a portrait of a worried, self-protective cohort entering midlife, chronically embarrassed, simultaneously terrified of and hungry for intense experience. Or maybe that’s just the New Yorkers. Let’s say it is.