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Within the novel by Erin Somers A Decade-Long Liaison, we meet Cora, a woman in her prime who yearns for a type of romance from another era with a bygone kind of man. Unfortunately for her, morality in 2015 is inflexible and jaded, and instead of having the affair, Cora spends a full decade overthinking it, fantasising about it and discussing it with her potential lover, Sam – a playgroup dad who holds the title “chief storytelling officer” at a fintech company. This novel positions itself as a comic take 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 our entire generation has coming: a propulsive, witty takedown of unbearably anxious individuals who’ve somehow spoiled intimacy itself.

A Portrait of Smug Discontent

Cora and her husband Eliot are smug, overeducated Brooklynites who, as costs increased and their family expanded, have moved reluctantly upstate. Trapped by the “gruelling all-the-time-ness” of parenthood, they juggle 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 closer to nature. But if Cora is lonely here, it’s not because her fussy, lifeless lens but because her new neighbours 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 says he doesn’t wish to possess her. In her mind, Cora pictures herself trying to survive with Eliot in the woods, doing laundry by hand while he searches for chanterelles. She deeply desires drama, a bit of depravity, a lover who will plead, and worship, and “express raw admiration for her prowess”.

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

The Trouble with Over-Intellectualized Desire

The central conflict 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 says, but really about everything). What she feels for Sam are “tepid, barely beyond simple fondness”. She wants “a transcendent physical experience and escape her own reality momentarily”. But, for years, Sam refuses while Cora languishes. She imagines a parallel reality running concurrent to her actual existence, where in place of chores and errands, she has sex and hotels and Sam. When her fictional romance fizzles, her mind conjures “a French guy named 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, tragically lost to illness”.

A Sad Conclusion and Deeper Themes

When they finally do give in to their desires, the sex is sad, lacking in fun or mutual connection. It fails to be the nostalgically perfect affair she fantasized about for a full decade. Cora dons a slinky dress and Sam “stoically eat[s] her out within their rented space” prior to a meal. One imagines that Cora wants to inhabit a James Salter novel, where sex is sordid and confusing, where the power dynamics are unequal, and everyone misbehaves, and nobody keeps score.

Throughout the novel the core issue for Cora: she has such cutting wit, but so little joy. Of Sam’s erotic photo, Cora critiques, “he has clenched his abs and made sure he was hard, but has not cleared the frame of Crocs”. Given that the catalyst that diminished their pleasure was having children, readers may fret about what these idiots are doing to their children. As her daughter inquires about sex, the adults fumble. They start with babies then concede that sex serves other purposes. The father references male anatomy then admits it is not essential. Ultimately, he settles for, “you know genitals?”

Underpinning the narrative flows a quiet theme of familiar middle-age questions: is there purpose to our existence? Where do we go after death? These themes are more explicit in Cora's internal dialogues. Reading these exchanges, the reader may ponder what lesson Cora and her cynical lot would derive from their unsatisfying escapades. Would Cora grow more receptive of life’s imperfect joys, its sentimental delights? When Eliot asks about her affair in the middle of a podcast about rope, Cora thinks “all meaningful communication 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, uproariously funny, exquisitely detailed novel, crafted with such withering exactitude. It is profoundly self-aware, economical yet rich with implication: a depiction of an anxious, loin-girding generation entering midlife, perpetually self-conscious, simultaneously terrified of and hungry for intense experience. Or maybe that’s just the New Yorkers. Let’s say it is.