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In Erin Somers’s A Decade-Long Liaison, we meet a millennial mother named Cora, a woman in her prime who craves a type of romance from another era from a man of a different time. Unfortunately for her, the modern ethical landscape is inflexible and jaded, so rather than embarking on the affair, Cora spends 10 years obsessively analyzing it, daydreaming of it and talking it over with the object of her desire, Sam – a playgroup dad who holds the title “chief storytelling officer” at a mortgage start-up. This novel presents itself as a comic take on the traditional tale of infidelity and a sharp satire of a narrow, self-conscious group of downwardly mobile New Yorkers. It stands as the definitive narrative of middle-aged unfaithfulness our entire generation deserves: a propulsive, witty takedown of unbearably anxious individuals who’ve managed to ruin intimacy itself.

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 raising children, they juggle desk jobs, a pair of kids, and an ongoing fungal issue proliferating beneath their bathroom tiles which they cannot afford or muster the will to fix. Their social circle other smug, overeducated Brooklynites who have fled the city to drink negronis from rustic glassware and judge each other amidst a more rural setting. But if Cora is lonely here, it stems not from her fussy, lifeless lens but because her new neighbours are “dull and vain, duller and vainer than they were back in the city”.

Her husband Eliot remains intellectually lofty and utterly unaware. He snacks casually while she cleans vigorously and states he has no desire to own her. In her mind, Cora pictures herself trying to survive a rustic life together, 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 “express raw admiration for her prowess”.

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

The Problem of Over-Intellectualized Desire

The trouble is that Cora is just as intellectually constrained as her husband, and unable to surrender to primal passion. She finds it "an overwhelming request to feel fervor" (about work, she says, but really about everything). What she feels for Sam are “bland, liking-adjacent”. 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 pines. She constructs a parallel reality alongside her real life, where instead of bills and school pickups, 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, “leaving her with no duties, no responsibilities, no obligations, other than to be revered as a youthful bride, tragically lost to illness”.

A Disappointing Conclusion and Undercurrents

When they eventually succumb to their desires, their intimacy is melancholy, without much play or complicity. It isn’t the sepia-toned romance she dreamed up for a full decade. Cora puts on a slinky dress and Sam “stoically eat[s] her out within their rented space” 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.

Somers consistently suggests the core issue for Cora: she has such cutting wit, but so little joy. Of Sam’s erotic photo, Cora complains, “he tightened his stomach and made sure he was hard, but failed to remove his casual footwear from the shot”. Given that the catalyst that killed their fun was parenthood, readers may fret 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 serves other purposes. Eliot mentions a penis then concedes that one isn’t required. Ultimately, he settles for, “you know genitals?”

Underpinning the narrative flows a quiet theme of common existential queries of midlife: is there purpose to our existence? What follows our final breath? These ideas are more directly explored in Cora's internal dialogues. Considering these passages, one wonders what moral Cora and her cynical lot would take from their disappointing dramas. Would Cora grow more open to life’s flawed pleasures, its corny pleasures? Upon being questioned by Eliot about her affair during an audio program on bondage, Cora reflects “all meaningful communication is undermined by its particulars”. Others could argue it's enriched. But that’s not Cora, and Somers doesn’t give her character false epiphanies, or force growth beyond her capacity.

An Ultimate Appraisal

The result is a razor-sharp, hilarious, exquisitely detailed novel, written with such withering exactitude. It is profoundly self-aware, spare and brimming with subtext: a portrait of a worried, self-protective cohort in middle age, perpetually self-conscious, at once afraid of and desperate for sensation. Or maybe that’s just the New Yorkers. Let’s say it is.