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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 bygone kind of man. Unfortunately for her, the modern ethical landscape is inflexible and jaded, so rather than embarking on the affair, Cora spends 10 years obsessively analyzing it, daydreaming of it and talking it over with her potential lover, Sam – a father from her child's circle who works as “chief storytelling officer” at a fintech company. The book positions itself as a comic take on the classic adultery novel and a send-up of a narrow, self-conscious group of economically slipping New Yorkers. It stands as the midlife adultery story our entire generation deserves: a propulsive, witty takedown of insufferable hand-wringers who’ve somehow spoiled even sex.

Depicting Smug Discontent

The central couple, Cora and Eliot are smug, overeducated Brooklynites who, as costs increased and their family expanded, have moved reluctantly to the suburbs. Trapped by the “gruelling all-the-time-ness” of raising children, they juggle office careers, two children, 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 drink negronis out of mason jars and critique one another closer to nature. Yet Cora's isolation in this new environment, it’s not because her fussy, lifeless lens but because her new neighbours are “dull and vain, 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 says he doesn’t wish to possess her. Cora imagines them attempting to endure with Eliot in the woods, doing laundry by hand while he forages for mushrooms. She longs for drama, a bit of depravity, a lover who will beg, and adore, and “growl at the feet of the woman’s excellence”.

"The mundane grind of everyday existence, 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 unable to surrender to primal passion. It’s “too much to ask her to be passionate” (regarding her career, 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 not think about her life for a second”. But, for years, Sam refuses while Cora pines. She constructs an alternate timeline running concurrent to her actual existence, where in place of chores and errands, she has passion, luxury, and her imagined lover. As this fantasy dims, her mind conjures “a French guy named Baptiste” who teams up with Sam in helping her out of the bath, “nothing for her to do, no responsibilities, no obligations, other than to be revered as a youthful bride, tragically lost to illness”.

A Sad Conclusion and Undercurrents

When they finally do give in to their desires, the sex is sad, without much play or complicity. It fails to be the sepia-toned romance she dreamed up for a full decade. Cora puts on an alluring gown and Sam “performs oral sex with grim determination within their rented space” prior to a meal. The reader senses that Cora desires to inhabit 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 so little joy. Regarding an intimate picture from Sam, Cora complains, “he has clenched his abs and made sure he was hard, but failed to remove his casual footwear from the shot”. Given that the catalyst that killed their fun was having children, one worries about the impact these flawed adults have on their kids. When Cora’s daughter asks about sex, the parents stumble. They begin with procreation then acknowledge that sex isn’t always about babies. Eliot mentions a penis then admits it is not essential. Finally, he lands on, “you're aware of private parts?”

Beneath the story flows a quiet theme of common existential queries of midlife: 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 open to life’s flawed pleasures, its corny pleasures? When Eliot asks about her affair during an audio program on bondage, Cora thinks “every serious exchange is compromised by specific context”. Others could argue it's enriched. But that’s not Cora, and the author refuses to grant her character false epiphanies, or force growth beyond her capacity.

An Ultimate Appraisal

The result is a razor-sharp, hilarious, exquisitely detailed novel, crafted with devastating precision. It is absolutely aware of itself, spare and brimming with subtext: a depiction of an anxious, loin-girding generation in middle age, chronically embarrassed, simultaneously terrified of and hungry for intense experience. Or maybe that’s just the New Yorkers. Let’s say it is.