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Within Erin Somers’s A Decade-Long Liaison, we meet Cora, a millennial mother who yearns for a bygone kind of passion with a bygone kind of man. Sadly, for Cora, 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 “head narrative architect” at a fintech company. The book presents 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. One could call it the definitive narrative of middle-aged unfaithfulness this current cohort deserves: a propulsive, witty takedown of unbearably anxious individuals who’ve somehow spoiled intimacy itself.

A Portrait of Self-Satisfied Discontent

Cora and her husband Eliot are highly educated, somewhat arrogant former city dwellers who, with rents rising and children growing, have relocated with hesitation upstate. Trapped by the “exhausting constant demands” of parenthood, they juggle desk jobs, a pair of kids, and an ongoing fungal issue proliferating beneath their bathroom tiles which they cannot afford or muster the will to fix. They spend time with similarly minded urban exiles who have escaped the metropolis to drink negronis from rustic glassware and critique one another closer to nature. Yet Cora's isolation here, 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 snacks casually as she scrubs the oven and states he has no desire to own her. In her mind, Cora pictures them attempting to endure with Eliot in the woods, doing laundry by hand while he forages for mushrooms. She deeply desires drama, some moral abandon, a partner who will plead, and worship, and “growl at the feet of the woman’s excellence”.

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

The Trouble with Over-Intellectualized Desire

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 says, 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”. Yet, for a decade, Sam refuses while Cora languishes. 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, she imagines “a French guy named Baptiste” who teams up with Sam in assisting her from the tub, “nothing for her to do, no responsibilities, no obligations, except to be worshipped as a youthful bride, who’d died improbably of TB”.

A Sad Climax 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 dreamed up 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 desires to inhabit a James Salter novel, where intimacy is messy and ambiguous, where imbalances of control exist, and characters act out, and no one tallies the cost.

Throughout the novel the core issue for Cora: she possesses a sharp tongue, but a profound lack of happiness. Of Sam’s erotic photo, Cora complains, “he has clenched his abs and made sure he was hard, but failed to remove his casual footwear from the shot”. Since the event that diminished their pleasure was having children, 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 acknowledge that sex isn’t always about babies. Eliot mentions a penis then admits it is not essential. Ultimately, he settles for, “you're aware of private parts?”

Beneath the story runs the subtle undercurrent of familiar middle-age questions: do our lives have meaning? Where do we go after death? These themes are more explicit in Cora’s imagined conversations. Reading these exchanges, the reader may ponder what moral Cora and her jaded circle would take from their disappointing dramas. Would Cora grow more open to life’s imperfect joys, its corny pleasures? When Eliot asks about her affair during an audio program on bondage, Cora reflects “all meaningful communication is undermined by its particulars”. Others could argue it's enriched. Yet that is not her nature, and Somers doesn’t give the protagonist easy revelations, or stretch her where she is unable to go.

A Final Assessment

The result is an incisive, hilarious, exquisitely detailed novel, crafted with such withering exactitude. It is absolutely aware of itself, economical yet rich with implication: a depiction of an anxious, loin-girding generation entering midlife, chronically embarrassed, at once afraid of and desperate for sensation. Or maybe that’s just the New Yorkers. Let’s say it is.