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In the novel by Erin Somers A Decade-Long Liaison, the story centers on Cora, a millennial mother who yearns for a bygone kind of passion from a man of a different time. Sadly, for Cora, the modern ethical landscape is inflexible and jaded, and instead of having the affair, Cora spends 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 traditional tale of infidelity and a send-up of a narrow, self-conscious group of economically slipping New Yorkers. One could call it the definitive narrative of middle-aged unfaithfulness this current cohort deserves: an energetic, clever critique of unbearably anxious individuals who’ve somehow spoiled even sex.

Depicting Self-Satisfied Discontent

Cora and her husband Eliot are highly educated, somewhat arrogant former city dwellers who, with rents rising and children growing, have moved reluctantly upstate. Trapped by the “exhausting constant demands” of raising children, they juggle desk jobs, a pair of kids, and a persistent mushroom 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 amidst a more rural setting. 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 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 forages for mushrooms. She deeply desires drama, some moral abandon, a partner who will beg, 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 central conflict is that she’s as high-minded and rigid as Eliot, and incapable of that kind of abandon herself. She finds it "an overwhelming request to feel fervor" (regarding her career, she says, but really about everything). Her feelings for Sam are “bland, liking-adjacent”. She wants “a transcendent physical experience and not think about her life for a second”. But, for years, Sam demurs while Cora pines. She imagines a parallel reality running concurrent to her actual existence, where in place of chores and errands, she has sex and hotels and Sam. As this fantasy dims, she imagines “a French guy named Baptiste” who teams up with Sam in assisting her from the tub, “leaving her with no duties, no tasks, no obligations, other than to be revered like someone’s teenage wife, tragically lost to illness”.

A Disappointing Climax and Deeper Themes

When they finally do give in to their desires, the sex is sad, lacking in fun or mutual connection. It isn’t the sepia-toned romance she dreamed up for 10 years. Cora dons a slinky dress and Sam “performs oral sex with grim determination in their hotel room” prior to a meal. One imagines that Cora wants to slip inside a certain type of literary world, where intimacy is messy and ambiguous, where the power dynamics are unequal, and everyone misbehaves, and nobody keeps score.

Throughout the novel the core issue for Cora: she possesses a sharp tongue, but so little joy. Of Sam’s erotic photo, Cora critiques, “he tightened his stomach and ensured he was aroused, but has not cleared the frame of Crocs”. 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 begin with procreation then concede that sex isn’t always about babies. The father references male anatomy then admits it is not essential. Finally, he lands on, “you know genitals?”

Underpinning the narrative runs the subtle undercurrent of familiar middle-age questions: is there purpose to our existence? Where do we go after death? These themes are more directly explored in Cora's internal dialogues. Reading these exchanges, one wonders what moral Cora and her cynical lot would take from their disappointing dramas. Would Cora grow more open to life’s imperfect joys, its corny pleasures? Upon being questioned by Eliot about her affair in the middle of a podcast about rope, Cora reflects “every serious exchange is compromised by specific context”. Others could argue it's enriched. 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.

An Ultimate Appraisal

The result is an incisive, uproariously funny, exquisitely detailed novel, crafted with such withering exactitude. It is profoundly self-aware, spare and brimming with subtext: a depiction of an anxious, loin-girding generation entering midlife, chronically embarrassed, simultaneously terrified of and hungry for intense experience. Or maybe that’s just the New Yorkers. Let’s say it is.