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In the novel by Erin Somers A Decade-Long Liaison, the story centers on Cora, a millennial mother who desperately wants a type of romance from another era from a bygone kind of man. Unfortunately for her, morality in 2015 is rigid and cynical, and instead of having the affair, Cora devotes 10 years obsessively analyzing it, daydreaming of it and discussing it with the object of her desire, Sam – a playgroup dad who works as “head narrative architect” at a mortgage start-up. The book presents itself as a humorous twist on the traditional tale of infidelity and a send-up of a narrow, self-conscious group of downwardly mobile New Yorkers. It stands as the midlife adultery story this current cohort deserves: a propulsive, witty takedown of unbearably anxious individuals who’ve somehow spoiled even sex.

A Portrait of Self-Satisfied Discontent

Cora and her husband 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 parenthood, they have office careers, a pair of kids, and an ongoing fungal issue growing under their bathroom tiles which they cannot afford or muster the will to fix. They spend time with other smug, overeducated Brooklynites who have fled the city to sip craft cocktails from rustic glassware and judge each other closer to nature. Yet Cora's isolation here, it stems not from her own critical, joyless perspective but because her new neighbours are “dull and vain, duller and vainer than they were back in the city”.

Eliot is high-minded and oblivious. He snacks casually while she cleans vigorously 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 longs for drama, some moral abandon, a partner who will beg, and worship, and “express raw admiration for her prowess”.

"The shabbiness of real life, you had to admire its consistency."

The Trouble with High-Minded Longing

The central conflict is that she’s as high-minded and rigid as Eliot, and incapable of that kind of abandon herself. It’s “too much to ask her to be passionate” (about work, she says, but really about everything). 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”. Yet, for a decade, Sam demurs while Cora pines. She constructs an alternate timeline alongside her real life, where in place of chores and errands, she has sex and hotels and Sam. When her fictional romance fizzles, her mind conjures “a French guy named Baptiste” who joins Sam in helping her out of the bath, “nothing for her to do, no tasks, no obligations, except to be worshipped as a youthful bride, tragically lost to illness”.

A Sad Conclusion and Undercurrents

When they finally do give in to temptation, their intimacy is melancholy, lacking in fun or mutual connection. It isn’t the nostalgically perfect affair she fantasized about for 10 years. Cora dons an alluring gown and Sam “stoically eat[s] her out within their rented space” before dinner. The reader senses that Cora wants to inhabit a James Salter novel, where sex is sordid and confusing, where imbalances of control exist, and everyone misbehaves, and nobody keeps score.

Somers consistently suggests the core issue for Cora: she possesses a sharp tongue, but a profound lack of happiness. Of Sam’s erotic photo, Cora critiques, “he has clenched his abs and ensured he was aroused, but failed to remove his casual footwear from the shot”. Given that the catalyst that killed their fun was having children, one worries about what these idiots are doing to their children. As her daughter inquires about sex, the adults fumble. They start with babies then concede that sex isn’t always about babies. Eliot mentions a penis then admits it is not essential. Ultimately, he settles for, “you're aware of private parts?”

Underpinning the narrative runs the subtle undercurrent of common existential queries of midlife: is there purpose to our existence? What follows our final breath? These ideas are more explicit in Cora's internal dialogues. Considering these passages, one wonders what moral Cora and her jaded circle would take from their unsatisfying escapades. Might Cora become more open to life’s imperfect joys, its sentimental delights? When Eliot asks about her affair in the middle of a podcast about rope, Cora thinks “all meaningful communication is undermined by its particulars”. Some might say enhanced. Yet that is not her nature, and the author refuses to grant the protagonist easy revelations, or stretch her where she is unable to go.

A Final Assessment

This is an incisive, hilarious, finely observed novel, crafted 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. Perhaps this is solely a metropolitan trait. For the sake of argument, we'll assume so.