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Within Erin Somers’s A Decade-Long Liaison, the story centers on Cora, a woman in her prime who yearns for a bygone kind of passion with a man of a different time. Sadly, for Cora, the modern ethical landscape is rigid and cynical, and instead of having the affair, Cora spends a full decade obsessively analyzing it, daydreaming of it and discussing it with her potential lover, Sam – a father from her child's circle who holds the title “chief storytelling officer” at a mortgage start-up. The book positions itself as a humorous twist on the traditional tale of infidelity and a sharp satire of a particular, self-aware clique of economically slipping New Yorkers. One could call it the definitive narrative of middle-aged unfaithfulness our entire generation has coming: a propulsive, witty takedown of insufferable hand-wringers who’ve managed to ruin intimacy itself.

A Portrait of Smug Unhappiness

Cora and her husband Eliot are highly educated, somewhat arrogant former city dwellers who, as costs increased and their family expanded, have relocated with hesitation upstate. Trapped by the “gruelling all-the-time-ness” of parenthood, they juggle desk jobs, a pair of kids, and a persistent mushroom growing under their bathroom tiles that they lack the energy and money to sort out. Their social circle similarly minded urban exiles who have fled the city to sip craft cocktails from rustic glassware and critique one another closer to nature. But if Cora is lonely in this new environment, 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 intellectually lofty and utterly unaware. He eats popcorn as she scrubs the oven and says he doesn’t wish to possess her. In her mind, Cora pictures herself trying to survive a rustic life together, doing laundry by hand while he forages for mushrooms. She longs for excitement, some moral abandon, a lover who will beg, and adore, and “express raw admiration for her prowess”.

"The shabbiness of real life, 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 incapable of that kind of abandon herself. She finds it "an overwhelming request to feel fervor" (regarding her career, she says, but really about everything). Her feelings for Sam are “bland, liking-adjacent”. She wants “to get fucked into the astral plane and escape her own reality momentarily”. But, for years, Sam demurs while Cora pines. 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 French guy named Baptiste” who joins Sam in assisting her from the tub, “nothing for her to do, no responsibilities, no requirements, except to be worshipped like someone’s teenage wife, who’d died improbably of TB”.

A Disappointing Climax and Deeper Themes

When they eventually succumb to their desires, the sex is sad, lacking in fun or mutual connection. It fails to be the sepia-toned romance she fantasized about for 10 years. 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 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.

Throughout the novel the root of Cora’s problem: she has such cutting wit, but a profound lack of happiness. Of Sam’s erotic photo, Cora critiques, “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, readers may fret 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 serves other purposes. Eliot mentions a penis then concedes that one isn’t required. Ultimately, he settles for, “you know genitals?”

Beneath the story runs the subtle undercurrent of common existential queries of midlife: is there purpose to our existence? What follows our final breath? These themes are more explicit in Cora’s imagined conversations. Considering these passages, the reader may ponder what moral Cora and her jaded circle would derive from their disappointing dramas. Might Cora become more receptive of life’s flawed pleasures, its sentimental delights? When Eliot asks about her affair during an audio program on bondage, Cora reflects “every serious exchange is compromised by specific context”. Some might say enhanced. But that’s not Cora, and the author refuses to grant her character false epiphanies, or stretch her where she is unable to go.

An Ultimate Assessment

The result is an incisive, hilarious, exquisitely detailed novel, written with such withering exactitude. It is profoundly self-aware, spare and brimming with subtext: a portrait of a worried, self-protective cohort in middle age, chronically embarrassed, simultaneously terrified of and hungry for intense experience. Perhaps this is solely a metropolitan trait. Let’s say it is.