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In the novel by Erin Somers A Decade-Long Liaison, the story centers on Cora, a millennial mother who craves a bygone kind of passion with a bygone kind of man. Unfortunately for her, the modern ethical landscape is inflexible and jaded, so rather than embarking on the affair, Cora devotes 10 years overthinking it, fantasising about 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. This novel positions itself as a comic take 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 even sex.

A Portrait of Self-Satisfied Discontent

The central couple, Cora and Eliot are smug, overeducated Brooklynites who, as costs increased and their family expanded, have relocated with hesitation upstate. Caught in the “exhausting constant demands” of parenthood, they have desk jobs, two children, and an ongoing fungal issue proliferating beneath their bathroom tiles that they lack the energy and money to sort out. Their social circle other smug, overeducated Brooklynites who have escaped the metropolis 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 new neighbours are “boring and self-absorbed, even more so than in their previous urban life”.

Eliot is high-minded and oblivious. He eats popcorn 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 searches for chanterelles. She deeply desires excitement, a bit of depravity, a lover who will plead, and worship, and “express raw admiration for her prowess”.

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

The Problem of High-Minded Desire

The trouble is that Cora is just as intellectually constrained as her husband, and incapable of that kind of abandon herself. It’s “too much to ask her to be passionate” (regarding her career, she says, but really about everything). Her feelings for Sam are “bland, liking-adjacent”. She craves “a transcendent physical experience and escape her own reality momentarily”. But, for years, Sam refuses while Cora languishes. She imagines a parallel reality alongside her real life, where in place of chores and errands, she has passion, luxury, and her imagined lover. As this fantasy dims, her mind conjures “a Gallic character called Baptiste” who teams up with Sam in assisting her from the tub, “nothing for her to do, no tasks, no requirements, other than to be revered like someone’s teenage wife, tragically lost to illness”.

A Sad Climax and Undercurrents

When they eventually succumb to their desires, the sex is sad, without much play or complicity. It fails to be the nostalgically perfect affair she fantasized about for a full decade. Cora dons an alluring gown and Sam “stoically eat[s] her out in their hotel room” prior to a meal. One imagines that Cora desires to slip inside a James Salter novel, where sex is sordid and confusing, where the power dynamics are unequal, and everyone misbehaves, and nobody keeps score.

Throughout the novel the core issue for Cora: she possesses a sharp tongue, but so little joy. Regarding an intimate picture from Sam, Cora critiques, “he has clenched his abs and ensured he was aroused, but has not cleared the frame of Crocs”. Since the event that diminished their pleasure was parenthood, readers may fret about what these idiots are doing to their children. 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. Finally, he lands on, “you're aware of private parts?”

Beneath the story runs the subtle undercurrent of familiar middle-age questions: is there purpose to our existence? What follows our final breath? These ideas are more explicit in Cora's internal dialogues. Considering these passages, the reader may ponder what lesson Cora and her jaded circle would take from their disappointing dramas. Might Cora become more open to life’s imperfect joys, its corny pleasures? Upon being questioned by Eliot about her affair during an audio program on bondage, Cora reflects “every serious exchange is undermined by its particulars”. Others could argue it's enriched. But that’s not Cora, and the author refuses to grant her character false epiphanies, or force growth beyond her capacity.

An Ultimate Assessment

The result is an incisive, hilarious, exquisitely detailed novel, written with such withering exactitude. It is absolutely aware of itself, economical yet rich with implication: a portrait of an anxious, loin-girding generation in middle age, chronically embarrassed, simultaneously terrified of and hungry for intense experience. Or maybe that’s just the New Yorkers. Let’s say it is.