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In the novel by Erin Somers A Decade-Long Liaison, we meet Cora, a millennial mother who yearns for a bygone kind of passion with a man of a different time. Unfortunately for her, the modern ethical landscape is rigid and cynical, so rather than embarking on the affair, Cora spends a full decade obsessively analyzing it, daydreaming of it and discussing it with the object of her desire, Sam – a playgroup dad who holds the title “head narrative architect” at a mortgage start-up. The book positions itself as a humorous twist on the traditional tale of infidelity and a send-up of a narrow, self-conscious group of economically slipping New Yorkers. It stands as the midlife adultery story this current cohort has coming: a propulsive, witty takedown of insufferable hand-wringers who’ve managed to ruin intimacy itself.

A Portrait of Self-Satisfied Discontent

The central couple, Cora and Eliot are highly educated, somewhat arrogant former city dwellers who, as costs increased and their family expanded, have relocated with hesitation upstate. Trapped by the “exhausting constant demands” of raising children, they juggle office careers, two children, and a persistent mushroom proliferating beneath 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 from rustic glassware 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 new neighbours are “boring and self-absorbed, duller and vainer than they were back in the city”.

Eliot is high-minded and oblivious. 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, washing clothes on a stone while he forages for mushrooms. She deeply desires 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 Trouble with High-Minded Longing

The central conflict 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). Her feelings 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”. Yet, for a decade, Sam demurs while Cora languishes. She imagines an alternate timeline alongside her real life, where in place of chores and errands, she has passion, luxury, and her imagined lover. As this fantasy dims, her mind conjures “a Gallic character called Baptiste” who joins Sam in assisting her from the tub, “nothing for her to do, no tasks, no obligations, other than to be revered as a youthful bride, who’d died improbably of TB”.

A Sad Conclusion and Undercurrents

When they finally do give in to their desires, the sex is sad, lacking in fun or mutual connection. It fails to be the nostalgically perfect affair she dreamed up for a full decade. Cora puts on an alluring gown and Sam “stoically eat[s] her out in their hotel room” prior to a meal. The reader senses that Cora desires to inhabit a certain type of literary world, where intimacy is messy and ambiguous, where the power dynamics are unequal, and characters act out, and no one tallies the cost.

Somers consistently suggests the root of Cora’s problem: she has such cutting wit, but so little joy. Of Sam’s erotic photo, Cora complains, “he has clenched his abs and ensured he was aroused, but failed to remove his casual footwear from the shot”. Since the event that killed their fun was having children, one worries about the impact these flawed adults have on their kids. When Cora’s daughter asks about sex, the adults fumble. They start with babies then concede that sex serves other purposes. Eliot mentions a penis then admits it is not essential. Ultimately, he settles for, “you're aware of private parts?”

Beneath the story flows a quiet theme of familiar middle-age questions: do our lives have meaning? Where do we go after death? These themes are more explicit in Cora's internal dialogues. 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 imperfect joys, its corny pleasures? When Eliot asks about her affair during an audio program on bondage, Cora thinks “all meaningful communication is compromised by specific context”. Some might say enhanced. Yet that is not her nature, and the author refuses to grant her character false epiphanies, or force growth beyond her capacity.

A Final Assessment

The result is an incisive, uproariously funny, exquisitely detailed novel, crafted with devastating precision. It is absolutely aware of itself, spare and brimming with subtext: a portrait of a worried, self-protective cohort 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.