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Within Erin Somers’s A Decade-Long Liaison, we meet a millennial mother named Cora, a millennial mother who craves a type of romance from another era with a man of a different time. Unfortunately for her, the modern ethical landscape is rigid and cynical, so rather than embarking on the affair, Cora devotes 10 years overthinking it, fantasising about it and talking it over with her potential lover, Sam – a father from her child's circle who holds the title “head narrative architect” at a mortgage start-up. The book 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. It stands as the midlife adultery story this current cohort deserves: an energetic, clever critique of insufferable hand-wringers who’ve somehow spoiled even sex.

A Portrait of Self-Satisfied Unhappiness

The central couple, Cora and Eliot are smug, overeducated Brooklynites who, as costs increased and their family expanded, have moved reluctantly upstate. Caught in the “gruelling all-the-time-ness” of raising children, they have office careers, 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 amidst a more rural setting. But if Cora is lonely in this new environment, it stems not from her own critical, joyless perspective but because her suburban peers are “boring and self-absorbed, duller and vainer than they were back in the city”.

Her husband Eliot remains intellectually lofty and utterly unaware. He eats popcorn as she scrubs the oven and states he has no desire to own her. Cora imagines herself trying to survive a rustic life together, washing clothes on a stone while he searches for chanterelles. She deeply desires drama, some moral abandon, a lover who will beg, and adore, and “growl at the feet of the woman’s excellence”.

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

The Problem of Over-Intellectualized Longing

The trouble is that Cora is just as intellectually constrained as her husband, 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). What she feels for Sam are “bland, liking-adjacent”. She craves “a transcendent physical experience and not think about her life for a second”. But, for years, Sam refuses while Cora pines. She imagines an alternate timeline 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, she imagines “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 like someone’s teenage wife, who’d died improbably of TB”.

A Sad Conclusion and Undercurrents

When they finally do give in to their desires, their intimacy is melancholy, without much play or complicity. It fails to be the sepia-toned romance she dreamed up for 10 years. Cora puts on a slinky dress and Sam “stoically eat[s] her out in their hotel room” before dinner. One imagines 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 no one tallies the cost.

Throughout the novel the root of Cora’s problem: she has such cutting wit, but so little joy. Of Sam’s erotic photo, Cora critiques, “he has clenched his abs and ensured he was aroused, but has not cleared the frame of Crocs”. Given that the catalyst that killed their fun was having children, one worries about what these idiots are doing to their children. As her daughter inquires about sex, the parents stumble. They start with babies then concede 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?”

Underpinning the narrative flows a quiet theme of common existential queries of midlife: is there purpose to our existence? What follows our final breath? These ideas are more explicit in Cora's internal dialogues. Reading these exchanges, one wonders what lesson Cora and her jaded circle would take from their unsatisfying escapades. Would Cora grow more open to 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”. Others could argue it's enriched. Yet that is not her nature, and Somers doesn’t give her character false epiphanies, or stretch her where she is unable to go.

A Final Assessment

The result is an incisive, uproariously funny, exquisitely detailed novel, crafted with such withering exactitude. It is profoundly self-aware, spare and brimming with subtext: a portrait of a worried, self-protective cohort 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.