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In the novel by Erin Somers A Decade-Long Liaison, we meet Cora, a woman in her prime who craves a type of romance from another era from a bygone kind of man. Unfortunately for her, the modern ethical landscape is rigid and cynical, so rather than embarking on the affair, Cora devotes 10 years overthinking it, daydreaming of 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 narrow, self-conscious group 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 somehow spoiled intimacy itself.

A Portrait of Smug Unhappiness

The central couple, Cora and Eliot are smug, overeducated Brooklynites who, with rents rising and children growing, have relocated with hesitation upstate. Trapped by the “exhausting constant demands” of raising children, they have desk jobs, two children, and an ongoing fungal issue proliferating beneath their bathroom tiles that they lack the energy and money to sort out. They spend time with other smug, overeducated Brooklynites who have escaped the metropolis to drink negronis from rustic glassware and judge each other amidst a more rural setting. 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, duller and vainer than they were back in the city”.

Her husband Eliot remains 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 a rustic life together, doing laundry by hand while he forages for mushrooms. She deeply desires excitement, some moral abandon, a partner who will beg, and adore, and “express raw admiration for her prowess”.

"The shabbiness of real life, you had to admire its consistency."

The Trouble with Over-Intellectualized Longing

The trouble is that Cora is just as intellectually constrained as her husband, and incapable of that kind of abandon herself. It’s “too much to ask her to be passionate” (regarding her career, she claims, but really about everything). Her feelings for Sam are “tepid, barely beyond simple fondness”. She wants “to get fucked into the astral plane and escape her own reality momentarily”. But, for years, Sam demurs while Cora pines. She constructs a parallel reality running concurrent to her actual existence, where in place of chores and errands, she has sex and hotels and Sam. 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 obligations, other than to be revered like someone’s teenage wife, tragically lost to illness”.

A Disappointing Conclusion and Undercurrents

When they finally do give in to their desires, the sex is sad, lacking in fun or mutual connection. It isn’t the nostalgically perfect affair she fantasized about for 10 years. Cora puts on an alluring gown and Sam “stoically eat[s] her out within their rented space” before dinner. One imagines that Cora desires to inhabit a certain type of literary world, where intimacy is messy and ambiguous, where imbalances of control exist, and everyone misbehaves, and no one tallies the cost.

Throughout the novel the root of Cora’s problem: she possesses a sharp tongue, but so little joy. Of Sam’s erotic photo, Cora complains, “he tightened his stomach and ensured he was aroused, but failed to remove his casual footwear from the shot”. 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 acknowledge that sex serves other purposes. The father references male anatomy then admits it is not essential. Ultimately, he settles for, “you know genitals?”

Underpinning the narrative flows a quiet theme of familiar middle-age questions: do our lives have meaning? Where do we go after death? These ideas are more explicit in Cora’s imagined conversations. Considering these passages, the reader may ponder what moral Cora and her cynical lot would derive from their unsatisfying escapades. Would Cora grow 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”. Others could argue it's enriched. Yet that is not her nature, and the author refuses to grant the protagonist easy revelations, or force growth beyond her capacity.

An Ultimate Appraisal

The result is an incisive, uproariously funny, exquisitely detailed novel, written with such withering exactitude. It is profoundly self-aware, 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. Let’s say it is.