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Within Erin Somers’s A Decade-Long Liaison, the story centers on Cora, a millennial mother who craves a bygone kind of passion from a man of a different time. Sadly, for Cora, the modern ethical landscape is inflexible and jaded, so rather than embarking on the affair, Cora devotes 10 years overthinking it, daydreaming of it and discussing it with her potential lover, Sam – a father from her child's circle who works as “head narrative architect” at a mortgage start-up. The book presents itself as a comic take on the classic adultery novel and a send-up of a particular, self-aware clique of economically slipping 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 even sex.

Depicting Self-Satisfied Unhappiness

The central couple, Cora and Eliot are smug, overeducated Brooklynites who, as costs increased and their family expanded, have moved reluctantly to the suburbs. Caught in the “exhausting constant demands” of raising children, they juggle office careers, 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 similarly minded urban exiles who have escaped the metropolis to sip craft cocktails out of mason jars and critique one another amidst a more rural setting. Yet Cora's isolation in this new environment, 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”.

Her husband Eliot remains intellectually lofty and utterly unaware. 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, washing clothes on a stone while he searches for chanterelles. She deeply desires excitement, some moral abandon, a lover who will beg, and adore, and “express raw admiration for her prowess”.

"The mundane grind of everyday existence, one must acknowledge its relentless predictability."

The Problem of High-Minded Longing

The central conflict is that Cora is just as intellectually constrained as her husband, and incapable of that kind of abandon herself. 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 “bland, liking-adjacent”. She wants “to get fucked into the astral plane and not think about her life for a second”. Yet, for a decade, Sam demurs while Cora languishes. She constructs an alternate timeline running concurrent to her actual existence, where in place of chores and errands, she has passion, luxury, and her imagined lover. As this fantasy dims, her mind conjures “a French guy named Baptiste” who joins Sam in helping her out of the bath, “nothing for her to do, no responsibilities, no requirements, other than to be revered as a youthful bride, tragically lost to illness”.

A Disappointing Climax and Deeper Themes

When they finally do give in to their desires, the sex is sad, without much play or complicity. It isn’t the sepia-toned romance 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 desires to inhabit a James Salter novel, where sex is sordid and confusing, where the power dynamics are unequal, and everyone misbehaves, and nobody keeps score.

Somers consistently suggests the root of Cora’s problem: she possesses a sharp tongue, but so little joy. Of Sam’s erotic photo, Cora complains, “he has clenched his abs and ensured he was aroused, but has not cleared the frame of Crocs”. 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 acknowledge that sex isn’t always about babies. Eliot mentions a penis then admits it is not essential. Finally, he lands on, “you know genitals?”

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 receptive of life’s flawed pleasures, 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. But that’s not Cora, and the author refuses to grant her character false epiphanies, or force growth beyond her capacity.

An Ultimate Appraisal

The result is an incisive, uproariously funny, finely observed novel, crafted with devastating precision. It is profoundly self-aware, spare and brimming with subtext: a depiction of a worried, self-protective cohort entering midlife, perpetually self-conscious, simultaneously terrified of and hungry for intense experience. Perhaps this is solely a metropolitan trait. For the sake of argument, we'll assume so.