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In Erin Somers’s A Decade-Long Liaison, we meet Cora, a millennial mother who craves a bygone kind of passion from a bygone kind of man. Unfortunately for her, morality in 2015 is inflexible and jaded, and instead of having the affair, Cora spends a full decade obsessively analyzing it, daydreaming of it and discussing it with her potential lover, Sam – a playgroup dad who holds the title “head narrative architect” at a fintech company. This novel positions itself as a comic take on the classic adultery novel and a send-up of a narrow, self-conscious group of downwardly mobile New Yorkers. One could call it the midlife adultery story our entire generation deserves: an energetic, clever critique of unbearably anxious individuals who’ve somehow spoiled intimacy itself.

A Portrait of Self-Satisfied Discontent

Cora and her husband Eliot are smug, overeducated Brooklynites who, as costs increased and their family expanded, have moved reluctantly to the suburbs. Trapped by the “gruelling all-the-time-ness” of parenthood, they have desk jobs, 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 similarly minded urban exiles who have fled the city to drink negronis out of mason jars and critique one another amidst a more rural setting. Yet Cora's isolation here, it stems not from her fussy, lifeless lens but because her suburban peers are “dull and vain, even more so than in their previous urban life”.

Eliot is high-minded and oblivious. He eats popcorn while she cleans vigorously and says he doesn’t wish to possess her. Cora imagines herself trying to survive a rustic life together, doing laundry by hand while he forages for mushrooms. She deeply desires excitement, a bit of depravity, a partner 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 Trouble with Over-Intellectualized Longing

The trouble 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 claims, but in truth, about all aspects of life). What she feels 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 imagines a parallel reality alongside her real life, where instead of bills and school pickups, she has sex and hotels and Sam. When her fictional romance fizzles, her mind conjures “a Gallic character called Baptiste” who joins Sam in helping her out of the bath, “nothing for her to do, 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, their intimacy is melancholy, lacking in fun or mutual connection. It fails to be the sepia-toned romance she dreamed up for 10 years. Cora dons an alluring gown and Sam “stoically eat[s] her out within their rented space” prior to a meal. The reader senses that Cora desires to inhabit a certain type of literary world, where sex is sordid and confusing, where the power dynamics are unequal, and everyone misbehaves, and nobody keeps score.

Throughout the novel the core issue for Cora: she has such cutting wit, but a profound lack of happiness. Of Sam’s erotic photo, Cora critiques, “he has clenched his abs and made sure he was hard, but failed to remove his casual footwear from the shot”. 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 start with babies then acknowledge that sex isn’t always about babies. Eliot mentions a penis then concedes that one isn’t required. Finally, he lands on, “you know genitals?”

Beneath the story runs the subtle undercurrent of familiar middle-age questions: do our lives have meaning? What follows our final breath? These ideas are more directly explored in Cora’s imagined conversations. Reading these exchanges, one wonders what lesson Cora and her jaded circle would derive from their unsatisfying escapades. Might Cora become more receptive of life’s flawed pleasures, its corny pleasures? 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. Yet that is not her nature, and the author refuses to grant her character false epiphanies, or force growth beyond her capacity.

An Ultimate Assessment

This is an incisive, hilarious, finely observed novel, crafted with such withering exactitude. It is profoundly self-aware, economical yet rich with implication: a portrait of a worried, self-protective cohort entering midlife, 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.