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Within Erin Somers’s A Decade-Long Liaison, we meet a millennial mother named Cora, a millennial mother who desperately wants a bygone kind of passion from a bygone kind of man. Sadly, for Cora, morality in 2015 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 mortgage start-up. This novel positions itself as a comic take 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 midlife adultery story this current cohort deserves: a propulsive, witty takedown of unbearably anxious individuals who’ve managed to ruin intimacy itself.

Depicting Smug Discontent

Cora and her husband Eliot are smug, overeducated Brooklynites who, with rents rising and children growing, have relocated with hesitation to the suburbs. Trapped by the “gruelling all-the-time-ness” of raising children, they juggle desk jobs, a pair of kids, and an ongoing fungal issue growing under their bathroom tiles that they lack the energy and money to sort out. Their social circle similarly minded urban exiles who have escaped the metropolis to sip craft cocktails from rustic glassware and critique one another amidst a more rural setting. Yet Cora's isolation here, it’s not because her fussy, lifeless lens but because her suburban peers are “dull and vain, duller and vainer than they were back in the city”.

Eliot is high-minded and oblivious. He eats popcorn as she scrubs the oven and states he has no desire to own her. In her mind, Cora pictures 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 mundane grind of everyday existence, one must acknowledge its relentless predictability."

The Problem of High-Minded Desire

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" (about work, she claims, but in truth, about all aspects of life). Her feelings for Sam are “tepid, barely beyond simple fondness”. She craves “a transcendent physical experience and not think about her life for a second”. Yet, for a decade, Sam refuses while Cora languishes. She constructs an alternate timeline alongside her real life, where in place of chores and errands, she has sex and hotels and Sam. As this fantasy dims, her mind conjures “a French guy named Baptiste” who teams up with Sam in helping her out of the bath, “leaving her with no duties, no tasks, no requirements, other than to be revered as a youthful bride, who’d died improbably of TB”.

A Sad Conclusion and Deeper Themes

When they eventually succumb to their desires, the sex is sad, without much play or complicity. It fails to be the nostalgically perfect affair she fantasized about for a full decade. Cora dons a slinky dress and Sam “stoically eat[s] her out within their rented space” prior to a meal. One imagines that Cora wants to slip inside a James Salter novel, where intimacy is messy and ambiguous, where the power dynamics are unequal, and characters act out, and no one tallies the cost.

Throughout the novel the root of Cora’s problem: she has such cutting wit, but a profound lack of happiness. Of Sam’s erotic photo, Cora critiques, “he tightened his stomach and ensured he was aroused, but has not cleared the frame of Crocs”. Since the event 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 adults fumble. They start with babies then acknowledge that sex isn’t always about babies. The father references male anatomy then concedes that one isn’t required. Finally, he lands on, “you're aware of private parts?”

Beneath the story runs the subtle undercurrent of familiar middle-age questions: is there purpose to our existence? Where do we go after death? These ideas are more explicit in Cora’s imagined conversations. Considering these passages, the reader may ponder what moral Cora and her cynical lot would derive from their disappointing dramas. Would Cora grow more open to life’s flawed pleasures, its sentimental delights? When Eliot asks about her affair in the middle of a podcast about rope, Cora thinks “every serious exchange is compromised by specific context”. Others could argue it's enriched. But that’s not Cora, and Somers doesn’t give her character false epiphanies, or stretch her where she is unable to go.

A Final Appraisal

This is a razor-sharp, uproariously funny, finely observed novel, written with devastating precision. 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.