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In Erin Somers’s A Decade-Long Liaison, the story centers on Cora, a woman in her prime who yearns for a type of romance from another era from a bygone kind of man. Sadly, for Cora, morality in 2015 is rigid and cynical, and instead of having the affair, Cora spends 10 years obsessively analyzing it, fantasising about it and talking it over with the object of her desire, Sam – a playgroup dad who works as “chief storytelling officer” at a mortgage start-up. This novel presents itself as a comic take on the traditional tale of infidelity and a send-up of a narrow, self-conscious group of economically slipping New Yorkers. One could call it the midlife adultery story this current cohort deserves: a propulsive, witty takedown of insufferable hand-wringers who’ve managed to ruin even sex.

Depicting Smug Unhappiness

The central couple, Cora and Eliot are smug, overeducated Brooklynites who, as costs increased and their family expanded, have moved reluctantly to the suburbs. Caught in the “exhausting constant demands” of raising children, they have desk jobs, two children, and a persistent mushroom growing under their bathroom tiles that they lack the energy and money to sort out. They spend time with similarly minded urban exiles who have escaped the metropolis to sip craft cocktails out of mason jars and judge each other closer to nature. Yet Cora's isolation here, it stems not from 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 intellectually lofty and utterly unaware. He snacks casually as she scrubs the oven 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 searches for chanterelles. She longs for excitement, some moral abandon, a partner who will plead, and adore, 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 she’s as high-minded and rigid as Eliot, and incapable of that kind of abandon herself. It’s “too much to ask her to be passionate” (regarding her career, she claims, but in truth, about all aspects of life). Her feelings for Sam are “tepid, barely beyond simple fondness”. She wants “a transcendent physical experience and escape her own reality momentarily”. But, for years, Sam demurs while Cora languishes. She constructs an alternate timeline alongside her real life, where instead of bills and school pickups, she has passion, luxury, and her imagined lover. When her fictional romance fizzles, she imagines “a Gallic character called Baptiste” who joins 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, tragically lost to illness”.

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 nostalgically perfect affair she fantasized about for a full decade. Cora puts on an alluring gown and Sam “performs oral sex with grim determination in their hotel room” prior to a meal. The reader senses that Cora desires 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.

Throughout the novel the core issue for Cora: she possesses a sharp tongue, but a profound lack of happiness. Regarding an intimate picture from Sam, 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 killed their fun was parenthood, one worries about the impact these flawed adults have on their kids. When Cora’s daughter asks about sex, the parents stumble. They start with babies then acknowledge that sex isn’t always about babies. The father references male anatomy then admits it is not essential. Ultimately, he settles for, “you're aware of private parts?”

Underpinning the narrative runs the subtle undercurrent of familiar middle-age questions: is there purpose to our existence? What follows our final breath? These ideas 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. Might Cora become more receptive of life’s imperfect joys, its corny pleasures? When Eliot asks about her affair in the middle of a podcast about rope, Cora thinks “every serious exchange is undermined by its particulars”. Some might say enhanced. But that’s not Cora, and Somers doesn’t give the protagonist easy revelations, or force growth beyond her capacity.

A Final Appraisal

The result is an incisive, hilarious, finely observed novel, crafted with devastating precision. It is absolutely aware of itself, 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. For the sake of argument, we'll assume so.