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In the novel by Erin Somers A Decade-Long Liaison, the story centers on Cora, a woman in her prime who yearns for a type of romance from another era with a man of a different time. Sadly, for Cora, morality in 2015 is inflexible and jaded, so rather than embarking on the affair, Cora devotes a full decade overthinking 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. This novel positions itself as a comic take on the traditional tale of infidelity and a send-up of a narrow, self-conscious group of downwardly mobile New Yorkers. It stands as the midlife adultery story this current cohort deserves: an energetic, clever critique of unbearably anxious individuals who’ve somehow spoiled intimacy itself.

A Portrait of Smug Unhappiness

The central couple, Cora and Eliot are smug, overeducated Brooklynites who, as costs increased and their family expanded, have moved reluctantly to the suburbs. Caught in the “gruelling all-the-time-ness” of parenthood, 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 escaped the metropolis to sip craft cocktails from rustic glassware and critique one another closer to nature. But if Cora is lonely in this new environment, it’s not because her fussy, lifeless lens but because her suburban peers 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 while she cleans vigorously and states he has no desire to own her. In her mind, Cora pictures them attempting to endure with Eliot in the woods, washing clothes on a stone while he searches for chanterelles. She deeply desires excitement, some moral abandon, a partner who will beg, and worship, and “express raw admiration for her prowess”.

"The shabbiness of real life, one must acknowledge its relentless predictability."

The Trouble with Over-Intellectualized Longing

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” (about work, she claims, but in truth, about all aspects of life). Her feelings for Sam are “bland, liking-adjacent”. She wants “to get fucked into the astral plane and not think about her life for a second”. Yet, for a decade, Sam demurs while Cora pines. She constructs a parallel reality alongside her real life, where instead of bills and school pickups, she has passion, luxury, and her imagined lover. When her fictional romance fizzles, her mind conjures “a French guy named Baptiste” who joins Sam in assisting her from the tub, “nothing for her to do, no responsibilities, no obligations, other than to be revered as a youthful bride, who’d died improbably of TB”.

A Disappointing Climax and Deeper Themes

When they finally do give in to their desires, the sex is sad, without much play or complicity. It isn’t the sepia-toned romance she fantasized about for a full decade. Cora dons a slinky dress and Sam “stoically eat[s] her out within their rented space” before dinner. One imagines that Cora desires to slip inside a James Salter novel, where intimacy is messy and ambiguous, where the power dynamics are unequal, and everyone misbehaves, and no one tallies the cost.

Somers consistently suggests the root of Cora’s problem: she has such cutting wit, but a profound lack of happiness. Of Sam’s erotic photo, Cora complains, “he tightened his stomach and ensured he was aroused, but failed to remove his casual footwear from the shot”. Given that the catalyst that diminished their pleasure was parenthood, readers may fret about the impact these flawed adults have on their kids. As her daughter inquires about sex, the adults fumble. They begin with procreation then concede that sex isn’t always about babies. The father references male anatomy then admits it is not essential. Finally, he lands on, “you're aware of private parts?”

Underpinning the narrative runs the subtle undercurrent of familiar middle-age questions: do our lives have meaning? What follows our final breath? These themes are more directly explored in Cora’s imagined conversations. Considering these passages, the reader may ponder what lesson Cora and her jaded circle would derive from their unsatisfying escapades. Might Cora become more receptive of life’s imperfect joys, its sentimental delights? Upon being questioned by Eliot 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 her character false epiphanies, or stretch her where she is unable to go.

A Final Appraisal

This is a razor-sharp, hilarious, exquisitely detailed novel, crafted with devastating precision. It is profoundly self-aware, economical yet rich with implication: a portrait of a worried, self-protective cohort entering midlife, chronically embarrassed, simultaneously terrified of and hungry for intense experience. Perhaps this is solely a metropolitan trait. Let’s say it is.