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Within Erin Somers’s A Decade-Long Liaison, the story centers on Cora, a woman in her prime who craves a type of romance from another era with a bygone kind of man. Unfortunately for her, morality in 2015 is rigid and cynical, so rather than embarking on the affair, Cora devotes a full decade overthinking it, daydreaming of it and talking it over with her potential lover, Sam – a playgroup dad who holds the title “chief storytelling officer” at a fintech company. This novel presents itself as a humorous twist on the classic adultery novel and a send-up of a particular, self-aware clique of downwardly mobile New Yorkers. One could call it the definitive narrative of middle-aged unfaithfulness this current cohort deserves: a propulsive, witty takedown of insufferable hand-wringers who’ve managed to ruin intimacy itself.

Depicting Self-Satisfied Unhappiness

The central couple, Cora and Eliot are smug, overeducated Brooklynites who, with rents rising and children growing, have moved reluctantly to the suburbs. Trapped by the “exhausting constant demands” of parenthood, they juggle desk jobs, a pair of kids, 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 out of mason jars and judge each other amidst a more rural setting. But if Cora is lonely in this new environment, it’s not because her own critical, joyless perspective but because her suburban peers are “boring and self-absorbed, even more so than in their previous urban life”.

Her husband Eliot remains high-minded and oblivious. He eats popcorn as she scrubs the oven and states he has no desire to own her. In her mind, Cora pictures herself trying to survive with Eliot in the woods, doing laundry by hand while he searches for chanterelles. She longs for drama, a bit of depravity, a partner who will plead, and worship, and “express raw admiration for her prowess”.

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

The Trouble with Over-Intellectualized 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" (regarding her career, she says, but in truth, about all aspects of life). What she feels for Sam are “bland, liking-adjacent”. She wants “to get fucked into the astral plane and not think about her life for a second”. But, for years, Sam demurs while Cora pines. She imagines an alternate timeline 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 assisting her from the tub, “leaving her with no duties, no responsibilities, no requirements, other than to be revered like someone’s teenage wife, 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 sepia-toned romance she dreamed up for a full decade. Cora puts on a slinky dress and Sam “performs oral sex with grim determination in their hotel room” before dinner. One imagines that Cora desires to slip inside a certain type of literary world, where intimacy is messy and ambiguous, where imbalances of control exist, and characters act out, and no one tallies the cost.

Throughout the novel the root of Cora’s problem: she possesses a sharp tongue, but so little joy. Regarding an intimate picture from Sam, Cora complains, “he has clenched his abs and ensured he was aroused, 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 adults fumble. They start with babies then concede 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 flows a quiet theme of common existential queries of midlife: do our lives have meaning? What follows our final breath? These themes are more directly explored in Cora’s imagined conversations. Considering these passages, the reader may ponder what moral Cora and her cynical lot would derive from their disappointing dramas. Might Cora become more receptive of life’s flawed pleasures, its sentimental delights? When Eliot asks about her affair in the middle of a podcast about rope, Cora reflects “all meaningful communication is compromised by specific context”. Some might say enhanced. But that’s not Cora, and Somers doesn’t give her character false epiphanies, or stretch her where she is unable to go.

An Ultimate Appraisal

The result is a razor-sharp, 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. For the sake of argument, we'll assume so.