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Within the novel by Erin Somers A Decade-Long Liaison, the story centers on a millennial mother named Cora, a woman in her prime who yearns for a bygone kind of passion from a man of a different time. Sadly, for Cora, morality in 2015 is inflexible and jaded, and instead of having the affair, Cora spends a full decade obsessively analyzing it, fantasising about it and discussing it with her potential lover, Sam – a father from her child's circle who works as “head narrative architect” at a fintech company. The book presents itself as a comic take on the traditional tale of infidelity and a send-up of a particular, self-aware clique of economically slipping New Yorkers. It stands as the midlife adultery story our entire generation deserves: an energetic, clever critique of insufferable hand-wringers who’ve somehow spoiled intimacy itself.

A Portrait of Smug Discontent

The central couple, Cora and Eliot are smug, overeducated Brooklynites who, with rents rising and children growing, have relocated with hesitation upstate. Caught in the “exhausting constant demands” of parenthood, they juggle desk jobs, 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 other smug, overeducated Brooklynites who have fled the city to sip craft cocktails out of mason jars and judge each other amidst a more rural setting. Yet Cora's isolation in this new environment, it stems not from 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 intellectually lofty and utterly unaware. He snacks casually while she cleans vigorously 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 searches for chanterelles. She longs for excitement, some moral abandon, a lover who will beg, and adore, and “express raw admiration for her prowess”.

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

The Problem of Over-Intellectualized Desire

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" (about work, she says, but really about everything). Her feelings for Sam are “tepid, barely beyond simple fondness”. She wants “a transcendent physical experience and escape her own reality momentarily”. Yet, for a decade, Sam demurs while Cora languishes. She constructs an alternate timeline alongside her real life, where instead of bills and school pickups, she has passion, luxury, and her imagined lover. When her fictional romance fizzles, she imagines “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 obligations, except to be worshipped like someone’s teenage wife, who’d died improbably of TB”.

A Disappointing Conclusion and Deeper Themes

When they finally do give in to temptation, their intimacy is melancholy, without much play or complicity. It fails to be the nostalgically perfect affair she dreamed up for a full decade. Cora puts on an alluring gown and Sam “stoically eat[s] her out in their hotel room” before dinner. The reader senses that Cora desires to inhabit a James Salter novel, where intimacy is messy and ambiguous, where the power dynamics are unequal, and everyone misbehaves, and no one tallies the cost.

Throughout the novel the core issue for Cora: she possesses a sharp tongue, but a profound lack of happiness. Regarding an intimate picture from Sam, Cora critiques, “he tightened his stomach and ensured he was aroused, but has not cleared the frame of Crocs”. Given that the catalyst that diminished their pleasure was parenthood, one worries about the impact these flawed adults have on their kids. As her daughter inquires about sex, the adults fumble. They begin with procreation then concede that sex serves other purposes. Eliot mentions a penis then admits it is not essential. Finally, he lands on, “you're aware of private parts?”

Beneath the story runs the subtle undercurrent of common existential queries of midlife: do our lives have meaning? Where do we go after death? These ideas are more explicit in Cora’s imagined conversations. Considering these passages, one wonders what lesson 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 thinks “every serious exchange is undermined by its particulars”. Some might say enhanced. Yet that is not her nature, and Somers doesn’t give her character false epiphanies, or force growth beyond her capacity.

A Final Appraisal

This is an incisive, hilarious, finely observed novel, crafted with such withering exactitude. It is absolutely aware of itself, 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. Perhaps this is solely a metropolitan trait. For the sake of argument, we'll assume so.