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Within the novel by Erin Somers A Decade-Long Liaison, the story centers on Cora, a millennial mother who craves a type of romance from another era from a bygone kind of man. Sadly, for Cora, morality in 2015 is rigid and cynical, so rather than embarking on the affair, Cora devotes a full decade overthinking it, daydreaming of it and discussing it with the object of her desire, Sam – a playgroup dad who works as “chief storytelling officer” at a mortgage start-up. The book positions itself as a humorous twist on the traditional tale of infidelity and a sharp satire of a narrow, self-conscious group of downwardly mobile New Yorkers. It stands as the midlife adultery story this current cohort deserves: a propulsive, witty takedown of unbearably anxious individuals who’ve managed to ruin intimacy itself.

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. Trapped by the “gruelling all-the-time-ness” of parenthood, they have office careers, two children, and a persistent mushroom proliferating beneath their bathroom tiles which they cannot afford or muster the will to fix. They spend time with other smug, overeducated Brooklynites 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 in this new environment, it’s not because her own critical, joyless perspective but because her suburban peers are “dull and vain, duller and vainer than they were back in the city”.

Her husband Eliot remains high-minded and oblivious. He snacks casually as she scrubs the oven and states he has no desire to own her. Cora imagines herself trying to survive with Eliot in the woods, doing laundry by hand while he searches for chanterelles. She deeply desires drama, some moral abandon, a lover who will plead, and adore, and “growl at the feet of the woman’s excellence”.

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

The Problem of High-Minded 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" (regarding her career, she says, but really about everything). 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 demurs while Cora languishes. She constructs a parallel reality running concurrent to her actual existence, where in place of chores and errands, she has passion, luxury, and her imagined lover. As this fantasy dims, 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 requirements, other than to be revered like someone’s teenage wife, who’d died improbably of TB”.

A Disappointing Conclusion and Deeper Themes

When they eventually succumb to temptation, the sex is sad, lacking in fun or mutual connection. It fails to be the nostalgically perfect affair she dreamed up for a full decade. Cora puts on a slinky dress and Sam “performs oral sex with grim determination within their rented space” prior to a meal. One imagines that Cora desires to slip inside 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.

Somers consistently suggests the core issue for Cora: she has such cutting wit, but a profound lack of happiness. Regarding an intimate picture from Sam, Cora complains, “he has clenched his abs and made sure he was hard, but failed to remove his casual footwear from the shot”. Since the event that diminished their pleasure was having children, one worries about the impact these flawed adults have on their kids. As her daughter inquires about sex, the parents stumble. They start with babies then acknowledge that sex serves other purposes. Eliot mentions a penis then concedes that one isn’t required. Finally, he lands on, “you're aware of private parts?”

Underpinning the narrative flows a quiet theme of common existential queries of midlife: is there purpose to our existence? What follows our final breath? These themes are more explicit in Cora's internal dialogues. Considering these passages, one wonders what moral Cora and her jaded circle would derive from their unsatisfying escapades. Would Cora grow more open to life’s imperfect joys, its corny pleasures? Upon being questioned by Eliot about her affair during an audio program on bondage, Cora reflects “all meaningful communication 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 stretch her where she is unable to go.

An Ultimate Assessment

The result is an incisive, uproariously funny, finely observed 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, perpetually self-conscious, at once afraid of and desperate for sensation. Or maybe that’s just the New Yorkers. Let’s say it is.