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Within Erin Somers’s A Decade-Long Liaison, we meet Cora, a millennial mother who craves a type of romance from another era from a man of a different time. Sadly, for Cora, morality in 2015 is inflexible and jaded, and instead of having 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 works as “chief storytelling officer” at a fintech company. This novel presents itself as a humorous twist on the traditional tale of infidelity and a send-up of a narrow, self-conscious group of economically slipping New Yorkers. One could call it the midlife adultery story our entire generation has coming: an energetic, clever critique of unbearably anxious individuals who’ve managed to ruin intimacy itself.

Depicting Smug Unhappiness

Cora and her husband Eliot are highly educated, somewhat arrogant former city dwellers who, with rents rising and children growing, have moved reluctantly 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. They spend time with similarly minded urban exiles who have fled the city 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 own critical, joyless perspective but because her new neighbours are “dull and vain, even more so than in their previous urban life”.

Her husband Eliot remains intellectually lofty and utterly unaware. He eats popcorn while she cleans vigorously and says he doesn’t wish to possess her. Cora imagines herself trying to survive a rustic life together, washing clothes on a stone while he searches for chanterelles. She longs for excitement, a bit of depravity, a lover who will plead, and worship, 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 claims, but really about everything). What she feels for Sam are “bland, liking-adjacent”. She craves “a transcendent physical experience and escape her own reality momentarily”. But, for years, Sam demurs while Cora pines. She imagines a parallel reality running concurrent to her actual existence, where in place of chores and errands, she has sex and hotels and Sam. As this fantasy dims, 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 Conclusion and Undercurrents

When they eventually succumb to temptation, the sex is sad, without much play or complicity. It fails to be the sepia-toned romance she fantasized about for a full decade. Cora dons a slinky dress and Sam “performs oral sex with grim determination within their rented space” prior to a meal. One imagines that Cora desires to inhabit a certain type of literary world, where intimacy is messy and ambiguous, where the power dynamics are unequal, and characters act out, 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 complains, “he tightened his stomach and made sure he was hard, but has not cleared the frame of Crocs”. Since the event that diminished their pleasure was parenthood, one worries about what these idiots are doing to their children. When Cora’s daughter asks about sex, the adults fumble. They start with babies then concede that sex isn’t always about babies. The father references male anatomy then concedes that one isn’t required. Finally, he lands on, “you're aware of private parts?”

Beneath the story flows a quiet theme of common existential queries of midlife: do our lives have meaning? What follows our final breath? These themes are more directly explored in Cora’s imagined conversations. Reading these exchanges, one wonders what moral Cora and her cynical lot would take from their unsatisfying escapades. Might Cora become more open to life’s imperfect joys, 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 the protagonist easy revelations, or stretch her where she is unable to go.

A Final Assessment

This 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 an anxious, loin-girding generation in middle age, perpetually self-conscious, simultaneously terrified of and hungry for intense experience. Perhaps this is solely a metropolitan trait. For the sake of argument, we'll assume so.