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In Erin Somers’s A Decade-Long Liaison, the story centers on a millennial mother named Cora, a millennial mother who desperately wants a type of romance from another era from a man of a different time. Sadly, for Cora, the modern ethical landscape 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 works as “chief storytelling officer” at a fintech company. This novel positions itself as a comic take on the traditional tale of infidelity and a send-up of a particular, self-aware clique of economically slipping New Yorkers. One could call it the midlife adultery story this current cohort has coming: an energetic, clever critique of unbearably anxious individuals who’ve somehow spoiled intimacy itself.

A Portrait of Self-Satisfied Discontent

The central couple, Cora and Eliot are highly educated, somewhat arrogant former city dwellers who, with rents rising and children growing, have moved reluctantly to the suburbs. Caught in the “gruelling all-the-time-ness” of raising children, they juggle desk jobs, a pair of kids, and an ongoing fungal issue proliferating beneath their bathroom tiles that they lack the energy and money to sort out. Their social circle similarly minded urban exiles who have escaped the metropolis to sip craft cocktails from rustic glassware and critique one another closer to nature. But if Cora is lonely in this new environment, it’s not because her own critical, joyless perspective but because her new neighbours are “boring and self-absorbed, duller and vainer than they were back in the city”.

Her husband Eliot remains high-minded and oblivious. He eats popcorn as she scrubs the oven and says he doesn’t wish to possess her. In her mind, Cora pictures herself trying to survive a rustic life together, doing laundry by hand while he forages for mushrooms. She longs for excitement, some moral abandon, a partner who will plead, and worship, and “growl at the feet of the woman’s excellence”.

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

The Problem of Over-Intellectualized Longing

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 claims, but in truth, about all aspects of life). What she feels for Sam are “bland, liking-adjacent”. She wants “to get fucked into the astral plane and not think about her life for a second”. Yet, for a decade, Sam demurs while Cora pines. She imagines a parallel reality alongside her real life, where in place of chores and errands, she has sex and hotels and Sam. As this fantasy dims, her mind conjures “a French guy named Baptiste” who joins Sam in assisting her from the tub, “leaving her with no duties, no tasks, no requirements, except to be worshipped like someone’s teenage wife, tragically lost to illness”.

A Sad Conclusion and Undercurrents

When they finally do give in to temptation, their intimacy is melancholy, without much play or complicity. It isn’t the nostalgically perfect affair she fantasized about for a full decade. Cora puts on an alluring gown and Sam “stoically eat[s] her out within their rented space” prior to a meal. One imagines that Cora desires to inhabit a James Salter novel, where intimacy is messy and ambiguous, where the power dynamics are unequal, and characters act out, and nobody keeps score.

Somers consistently suggests the core issue for Cora: she has such cutting wit, but so little joy. Of Sam’s erotic photo, Cora complains, “he tightened his stomach and made sure he was hard, but has not cleared the frame of Crocs”. Since the event that diminished their pleasure was parenthood, one worries about what these idiots are doing to their children. As her daughter inquires about sex, the adults fumble. They begin with procreation 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?”

Underpinning the narrative runs the subtle undercurrent of common existential queries of midlife: is there purpose to our existence? Where do we go after death? These ideas are more explicit in Cora's internal dialogues. Reading these exchanges, one wonders what moral Cora and her cynical lot would take from their disappointing dramas. Would Cora grow more receptive of life’s flawed pleasures, its sentimental delights? Upon being questioned by Eliot about her affair in the middle of a podcast about rope, Cora reflects “every serious exchange is compromised by specific context”. Others could argue it's enriched. Yet that is not her nature, and the author refuses to grant her character false epiphanies, or force growth beyond her capacity.

An Ultimate Appraisal

The result is an incisive, hilarious, exquisitely detailed novel, crafted with devastating precision. It is profoundly self-aware, spare and brimming with subtext: a portrait of an anxious, loin-girding generation entering midlife, perpetually self-conscious, simultaneously terrified of and hungry for intense experience. Perhaps this is solely a metropolitan trait. Let’s say it is.