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In Erin Somers’s A Decade-Long Liaison, the story centers on Cora, a woman in her prime who craves a bygone kind of passion from a man of a different time. Sadly, for Cora, the modern ethical landscape is rigid and cynical, and instead of having the affair, Cora devotes a full decade overthinking it, daydreaming of it and talking it over with her potential lover, Sam – a father from her child's circle who holds the title “head narrative architect” at a fintech company. This novel presents itself as a humorous twist on the traditional tale of infidelity and a sharp satire of a narrow, self-conscious group of economically slipping New Yorkers. It stands as the definitive narrative of middle-aged unfaithfulness our entire generation has coming: an energetic, clever critique of insufferable hand-wringers who’ve managed to ruin intimacy itself.

A Portrait of Self-Satisfied Discontent

Cora and her husband Eliot are smug, overeducated Brooklynites who, with rents rising and children growing, have relocated with hesitation upstate. Trapped by the “gruelling all-the-time-ness” of raising children, they have office careers, two children, and a persistent mushroom proliferating beneath their bathroom tiles that they lack the energy and money to sort out. They spend time with similarly minded urban exiles who have escaped the metropolis to drink negronis out of mason jars and judge each other closer to nature. Yet Cora's isolation in this new environment, it stems not from her own critical, joyless perspective but because her new neighbours are “dull and vain, even more so than in their previous urban life”.

Her husband Eliot remains 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, washing clothes on a stone while he forages for mushrooms. She deeply desires excitement, some moral abandon, a lover who will beg, and adore, and “growl at the feet of the woman’s excellence”.

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

The Problem of High-Minded Longing

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" (regarding her career, she says, but really about everything). What she feels for Sam are “tepid, barely beyond simple fondness”. She wants “to get fucked into the astral plane and not think about her life for a second”. Yet, for a decade, Sam refuses while Cora languishes. She constructs a parallel reality running concurrent to her actual existence, where in place of chores and errands, she has passion, luxury, and her imagined lover. As this fantasy dims, she imagines “a Gallic character called Baptiste” who teams up with Sam in helping her out of the bath, “nothing for her to do, no responsibilities, no requirements, other than to be revered like someone’s teenage wife, who’d died improbably of TB”.

A Disappointing Climax 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 a slinky dress and Sam “stoically eat[s] her out in their hotel room” before dinner. One imagines that Cora desires to slip inside a James Salter novel, where intimacy is messy and ambiguous, where imbalances of control exist, and everyone misbehaves, and nobody keeps score.

Somers consistently suggests the root of Cora’s problem: she possesses a sharp tongue, but a profound lack of happiness. Regarding an intimate picture from Sam, Cora critiques, “he tightened his stomach and ensured he was aroused, but failed to remove his casual footwear from the shot”. Since the event that diminished their pleasure was having children, one worries about the impact these flawed adults have on their kids. As her daughter inquires about sex, the parents stumble. They begin with procreation then acknowledge that sex isn’t always about babies. The father references male anatomy then admits it is not essential. Finally, he lands on, “you're aware of private parts?”

Underpinning the narrative runs the subtle undercurrent of familiar middle-age questions: is there purpose to our existence? What follows our final breath? These themes are more explicit in Cora's internal dialogues. Considering these passages, the reader may ponder what moral Cora and her cynical lot would take from their unsatisfying escapades. Might Cora become more receptive of life’s flawed pleasures, its corny pleasures? When Eliot asks about her affair during an audio program on bondage, Cora reflects “all meaningful communication is compromised by specific context”. 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 Assessment

This is an incisive, uproariously funny, exquisitely detailed novel, crafted with devastating precision. It is profoundly self-aware, spare and brimming with subtext: a portrait of an anxious, loin-girding generation entering midlife, perpetually self-conscious, at once afraid of and desperate for sensation. Perhaps this is solely a metropolitan trait. For the sake of argument, we'll assume so.