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In the novel by Erin Somers A Decade-Long Liaison, the story centers on Cora, a millennial mother who craves a type of romance from another era from a bygone kind of man. Sadly, for Cora, the modern ethical landscape is rigid and cynical, and instead of having the affair, Cora spends 10 years overthinking it, daydreaming of it and discussing it with the object of her desire, Sam – a father from her child's circle who works as “chief storytelling officer” at a mortgage start-up. This novel positions itself as a humorous twist 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 midlife adultery story this current cohort has coming: a propulsive, witty takedown of unbearably anxious individuals who’ve somehow spoiled intimacy itself.

A Portrait of Self-Satisfied Discontent

Cora and her husband Eliot are smug, overeducated Brooklynites who, as costs increased and their family expanded, have moved reluctantly to the suburbs. Trapped by the “gruelling all-the-time-ness” of raising children, they have office careers, a pair of kids, and a persistent mushroom growing under their bathroom tiles that they lack the energy and money to sort out. They spend time with similarly minded urban exiles who have fled the city to drink negronis from rustic glassware and critique one another amidst a more rural setting. But if Cora is lonely here, it’s not because her fussy, lifeless lens 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 eats popcorn while she cleans vigorously and states he has no desire to own her. Cora imagines herself trying to survive a rustic life together, doing laundry by hand while he forages for mushrooms. She deeply desires excitement, some moral abandon, a lover who will plead, and worship, and “express raw admiration for her prowess”.

"The mundane grind of everyday existence, you had to admire its consistency."

The Problem of Over-Intellectualized Longing

The trouble is that she’s as high-minded and rigid as Eliot, and unable to surrender to primal passion. It’s “too much to ask her to be passionate” (regarding her career, 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 escape her own reality momentarily”. 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, she imagines “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 Disappointing Conclusion and Deeper Themes

When they eventually succumb 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 dons an alluring gown and Sam “performs oral sex with grim determination within their rented space” before dinner. One imagines that Cora wants to slip inside a James Salter novel, where sex is sordid and confusing, where imbalances of control exist, and everyone misbehaves, and nobody keeps score.

Throughout the novel the root of Cora’s problem: she possesses a sharp tongue, but so little joy. Of Sam’s erotic photo, Cora complains, “he tightened his stomach and made sure he was hard, but has not cleared the frame of Crocs”. Given that the catalyst 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 parents stumble. They start with babies then acknowledge that sex isn’t always about babies. Eliot mentions a penis then admits it is not essential. Finally, he lands on, “you're aware of private parts?”

Underpinning the narrative flows a quiet theme of common existential queries of midlife: is there purpose to our existence? Where do we go after death? These themes are more directly explored in Cora’s imagined conversations. Considering these passages, one wonders what moral Cora and her jaded circle would take from their disappointing dramas. Would Cora grow more receptive of life’s imperfect joys, its sentimental delights? When Eliot asks about her affair in the middle of a podcast about rope, Cora reflects “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 force growth beyond her capacity.

A Final Assessment

This is a razor-sharp, uproariously funny, exquisitely detailed novel, crafted with such withering exactitude. It is profoundly self-aware, economical yet rich with implication: a portrait of an anxious, loin-girding generation in middle age, chronically embarrassed, simultaneously terrified of and hungry for intense experience. Perhaps this is solely a metropolitan trait. For the sake of argument, we'll assume so.