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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 type of romance from another era from a man of a different time. Sadly, for Cora, morality in 2015 is rigid and cynical, so rather than embarking on the affair, Cora spends a full decade obsessively analyzing it, fantasising about it and discussing it with the object of her desire, Sam – a playgroup dad who holds the title “head narrative architect” at a mortgage start-up. This novel presents itself as a comic take on the traditional tale of infidelity and a sharp satire of a narrow, self-conscious group of economically slipping New Yorkers. It stands as the midlife adultery story this current cohort has coming: an energetic, clever critique of insufferable hand-wringers who’ve somehow spoiled intimacy itself.

Depicting Smug 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 an ongoing fungal issue proliferating beneath their bathroom tiles which they cannot afford or muster the will to fix. They spend time with similarly minded urban exiles who have escaped the metropolis to drink negronis from rustic glassware and judge each other closer to nature. But if Cora is lonely in this new environment, it’s not because her fussy, lifeless lens but because her suburban peers are “boring and self-absorbed, 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 states he has no desire to own her. Cora imagines them attempting to endure a rustic life together, doing laundry by hand while he forages for mushrooms. She longs for drama, a bit of depravity, a lover who will beg, and worship, and “express raw admiration for her prowess”.

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

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. She finds it "an overwhelming request to feel fervor" (about work, 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 pines. She imagines an alternate timeline alongside her real life, where in place of chores and errands, she has passion, luxury, and her imagined lover. When her fictional romance fizzles, her mind conjures “a Gallic character called Baptiste” who teams up with Sam in assisting her from the tub, “leaving her with no duties, no responsibilities, no obligations, except to be worshipped as a youthful bride, who’d died improbably of TB”.

A Disappointing Conclusion and Deeper Themes

When they eventually succumb to their desires, 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 dons a slinky dress and Sam “performs oral sex with grim determination in their hotel room” prior to a meal. One imagines that Cora wants to slip inside a James Salter novel, where sex is sordid and confusing, where the power dynamics are unequal, and characters act out, and no one tallies the cost.

Throughout the novel the root of Cora’s problem: she has such cutting wit, but so little joy. Of Sam’s erotic photo, Cora complains, “he has clenched his abs and ensured he was aroused, but failed to remove his casual footwear from the shot”. Given that the catalyst that diminished their pleasure was parenthood, readers may fret about what these idiots are doing to their children. As her daughter inquires about sex, the parents stumble. They begin with procreation then acknowledge that sex serves other purposes. The father references male anatomy then admits it is not essential. Ultimately, he settles for, “you're aware of private parts?”

Beneath the story flows a quiet theme of familiar middle-age questions: do our lives have meaning? What follows our final breath? These ideas are more explicit in Cora's internal dialogues. Considering these passages, one wonders what lesson Cora and her jaded circle would take from their unsatisfying escapades. Would Cora grow more receptive of life’s flawed pleasures, its sentimental delights? Upon being questioned by Eliot about her affair during an audio program on bondage, Cora reflects “all meaningful communication is compromised by specific context”. Others could argue it's enriched. But that’s not Cora, and the author refuses to grant the protagonist easy revelations, or stretch her where she is unable to go.

A Final Appraisal

This is a razor-sharp, uproariously funny, finely observed novel, crafted with such withering exactitude. It is profoundly self-aware, spare and brimming with subtext: a depiction of an anxious, loin-girding generation in middle age, perpetually self-conscious, simultaneously terrified of and hungry for intense experience. Perhaps this is solely a metropolitan trait. Let’s say it is.