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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 man of a different time. Sadly, for Cora, the modern ethical landscape is rigid and cynical, so rather than embarking on the affair, Cora devotes 10 years obsessively analyzing it, fantasising about it and discussing it with her potential lover, Sam – a father from her child's circle who holds the title “chief storytelling officer” at a mortgage start-up. The book presents itself as a humorous twist on the traditional tale of infidelity and a send-up of a particular, self-aware clique of economically slipping New Yorkers. One could call it the midlife adultery story our entire generation deserves: a propulsive, witty takedown of insufferable hand-wringers who’ve managed to ruin even sex.

A Portrait of Self-Satisfied Discontent

Cora and her husband Eliot are smug, overeducated Brooklynites who, with rents rising and children growing, have moved reluctantly upstate. Caught in the “gruelling all-the-time-ness” of raising children, they juggle office careers, a pair of kids, and a persistent mushroom proliferating beneath their bathroom tiles that they lack the energy and money to sort out. Their social circle other smug, overeducated Brooklynites who have fled the city to sip craft cocktails out of mason jars 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 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 snacks casually while she cleans vigorously and says he doesn’t wish to possess her. Cora imagines them attempting to endure a rustic life together, doing laundry by hand while he searches for chanterelles. She longs for excitement, a bit of depravity, a lover who will plead, and worship, and “growl at the feet of the woman’s excellence”.

"The shabbiness of real life, one must acknowledge its relentless predictability."

The Trouble with Over-Intellectualized Longing

The central conflict 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 in truth, about all aspects of life). What she feels for Sam are “bland, liking-adjacent”. She craves “a transcendent physical experience and not think about her life for a second”. Yet, for a decade, Sam refuses while Cora pines. She imagines an alternate timeline running concurrent to her actual existence, where in place of chores and errands, she has passion, luxury, and her imagined lover. When her fictional romance fizzles, her mind conjures “a Gallic character called Baptiste” who teams up with Sam in helping her out of the bath, “leaving her with no duties, no tasks, no requirements, except to be worshipped as a youthful bride, tragically lost to illness”.

A Sad Climax and Deeper Themes

When they eventually succumb to temptation, the sex is sad, without much play or complicity. It fails to be the nostalgically perfect affair she dreamed up for 10 years. Cora puts on an alluring gown and Sam “performs oral sex with grim determination within their rented space” before dinner. The reader senses that Cora desires to inhabit a certain type of literary world, where sex is sordid and confusing, where imbalances of control exist, and characters act out, and no one tallies the cost.

Throughout the novel the root of Cora’s problem: she possesses a sharp tongue, but so little joy. Regarding an intimate picture from Sam, Cora complains, “he has clenched his abs and made sure he was hard, but has not cleared the frame of Crocs”. Since the event that killed their fun was having children, 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 serves other purposes. Eliot mentions a penis then admits it is not essential. Ultimately, he settles for, “you're aware of private parts?”

Beneath the story runs the subtle undercurrent of common existential queries of midlife: do our lives have meaning? What follows our final breath? These themes are more directly explored in Cora's internal dialogues. Reading these exchanges, the reader may ponder what lesson Cora and her cynical lot would take from their unsatisfying escapades. Might Cora become more receptive of life’s flawed pleasures, its sentimental delights? Upon being questioned by Eliot about her affair during an audio program on bondage, Cora thinks “all meaningful communication is undermined by its particulars”. Some might say enhanced. Yet that is not her nature, and the author refuses to grant her character false epiphanies, or force growth beyond her capacity.

An Ultimate Appraisal

The result is an incisive, hilarious, exquisitely detailed novel, written with devastating precision. It is absolutely aware of itself, spare and brimming with subtext: a depiction of an anxious, loin-girding generation in middle age, chronically embarrassed, at once afraid of and desperate for sensation. Perhaps this is solely a metropolitan trait. For the sake of argument, we'll assume so.