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Within the novel by Erin Somers A Decade-Long Liaison, the story centers on Cora, a woman in her prime who desperately wants a bygone kind of passion with a bygone kind of man. Unfortunately for her, morality in 2015 is inflexible and jaded, so rather than embarking on the affair, Cora devotes a full decade obsessively analyzing it, fantasising about it and talking it over with the object of her desire, Sam – a father from her child's circle who holds the title “chief storytelling officer” at a mortgage start-up. This novel presents itself as a comic take on the classic adultery novel and a send-up of a particular, self-aware clique of downwardly mobile New Yorkers. It stands as the midlife adultery story our entire generation has coming: an energetic, clever critique of insufferable hand-wringers who’ve somehow spoiled even sex.

A Portrait of Self-Satisfied Unhappiness

The central couple, Cora and Eliot are smug, overeducated Brooklynites who, with rents rising and children growing, have relocated with hesitation to the suburbs. Caught in the “exhausting constant demands” of parenthood, they have office careers, 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 drink negronis from rustic glassware and critique one another closer to nature. But if Cora is lonely in this new environment, it stems not from her own critical, joyless perspective but because her new neighbours are “dull and vain, even more so than in their previous urban life”.

Her husband Eliot remains 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 with Eliot in the woods, doing laundry by hand while he searches for chanterelles. She deeply desires excitement, some moral abandon, a lover who will plead, and worship, and “express raw admiration for her prowess”.

"The shabbiness of real life, 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 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 escape her own reality momentarily”. But, for years, Sam refuses while Cora pines. She imagines a parallel reality alongside her real life, where instead of bills and school pickups, she has sex and hotels and Sam. As this fantasy dims, she imagines “a Gallic character called Baptiste” who teams up with Sam in assisting her from the tub, “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 Sad Conclusion and Deeper Themes

When they eventually succumb to temptation, 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 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 James Salter novel, where sex is sordid and confusing, where the power dynamics are unequal, and characters act out, and nobody keeps score.

Somers consistently suggests the core issue for Cora: she possesses a sharp tongue, 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 has not cleared the frame of Crocs”. Given that the catalyst that diminished their pleasure was having children, readers may fret about the impact these flawed adults have on their kids. As her daughter inquires about sex, the adults fumble. They start with babies then concede that sex serves other purposes. The father references male anatomy 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: is there purpose to our existence? Where do we go after death? These themes are more explicit in Cora’s imagined conversations. Reading these exchanges, the reader may ponder what moral Cora and her cynical lot would take from their disappointing dramas. Would Cora grow more receptive of life’s flawed pleasures, its corny pleasures? Upon being questioned by Eliot about her affair in the middle of a podcast about rope, Cora reflects “all meaningful communication is undermined by its particulars”. Others could argue it's enriched. Yet that is not her nature, and the author refuses to grant the protagonist easy revelations, or stretch her where she is unable to go.

An Ultimate Assessment

This is an incisive, uproariously funny, exquisitely detailed novel, crafted with such withering exactitude. It is profoundly self-aware, economical yet rich with implication: a portrait of an anxious, loin-girding generation in middle age, chronically embarrassed, simultaneously terrified of and hungry for intense experience. Or maybe that’s just the New Yorkers. Let’s say it is.