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In the novel by Erin Somers A Decade-Long Liaison, we meet Cora, a woman in her prime who desperately wants a bygone kind of passion with a man of a different time. Unfortunately for her, the modern ethical landscape is rigid and cynical, and instead of having the affair, Cora devotes a full decade obsessively analyzing it, fantasising about it and discussing it with her potential lover, Sam – a father from her child's circle who holds the title “head narrative architect” at a fintech company. This novel presents 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. One could call it the midlife adultery story our entire generation deserves: a propulsive, witty takedown of unbearably anxious individuals who’ve managed to ruin intimacy itself.

Depicting Smug Unhappiness

Cora and her husband Eliot are smug, overeducated Brooklynites who, with rents rising and children growing, have moved reluctantly to the suburbs. Caught in the “exhausting constant demands” of parenthood, they juggle 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 fled the city to sip craft cocktails out of mason jars and critique one another closer to nature. Yet Cora's isolation here, it stems not from her own critical, joyless perspective but because her new neighbours 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 deeply desires excitement, a bit of depravity, a lover who will plead, and adore, and “growl at the feet of the woman’s excellence”.

"The mundane grind of everyday existence, one must acknowledge its relentless predictability."

The Problem of Over-Intellectualized Longing

The central conflict is that she’s as high-minded and rigid as Eliot, and unable to surrender to primal passion. It’s “too much to ask her to be passionate” (about work, she claims, but in truth, about all aspects of life). What she feels for Sam are “tepid, barely beyond simple fondness”. She craves “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 alongside her real life, where in place of chores and errands, she has passion, luxury, and her imagined lover. When her fictional romance fizzles, she imagines “a French guy named Baptiste” who joins Sam in helping her out of the bath, “nothing for her to do, no responsibilities, no obligations, except to be worshipped like someone’s teenage wife, who’d died improbably of TB”.

A Disappointing Conclusion and Deeper Themes

When they finally do give in to temptation, the sex is sad, without much play or complicity. It isn’t the sepia-toned romance she fantasized about for 10 years. Cora dons a slinky dress and Sam “stoically eat[s] her out in their hotel room” prior to a meal. The reader senses that Cora wants to slip inside a certain type of literary world, where intimacy is messy and ambiguous, 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. 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”. Since the event that killed their fun was having children, readers may fret about what these idiots are doing to their children. When Cora’s daughter asks about sex, the adults fumble. They start with babies then acknowledge that sex isn’t always about babies. Eliot mentions a penis then concedes that one isn’t required. Ultimately, he settles for, “you know genitals?”

Underpinning the narrative runs the subtle undercurrent of familiar middle-age questions: is there purpose to our existence? What follows our final breath? These themes are more directly explored in Cora's internal dialogues. Reading these exchanges, the reader may ponder what moral Cora and her jaded circle would derive 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 in the middle of a podcast about rope, Cora thinks “all meaningful communication is compromised by specific context”. Some might say enhanced. But that’s not Cora, and Somers doesn’t give her character false epiphanies, or stretch her where she is unable to go.

A Final Appraisal

The result is an incisive, uproariously funny, finely observed novel, crafted with devastating precision. It is profoundly self-aware, economical yet rich with implication: a depiction of an anxious, loin-girding generation in middle age, chronically embarrassed, simultaneously terrified of and hungry for intense experience. Perhaps this is solely a metropolitan trait. For the sake of argument, we'll assume so.