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Within Erin Somers’s A Decade-Long Liaison, we meet Cora, a woman in her prime who desperately wants a type of romance from another era from a man of a different time. Sadly, for Cora, morality in 2015 is inflexible and jaded, so rather than embarking on the affair, Cora spends a full decade overthinking it, daydreaming of it and talking it over with the object of her desire, Sam – a playgroup dad who works as “head narrative architect” at a fintech company. This novel positions itself as a comic take on the classic adultery novel and a sharp satire of a particular, self-aware clique of downwardly mobile New Yorkers. It stands as the definitive narrative of middle-aged unfaithfulness this current cohort deserves: an energetic, clever critique of unbearably anxious individuals who’ve somehow spoiled intimacy itself.

A Portrait of Self-Satisfied Discontent

The central couple, Cora and Eliot are highly educated, somewhat arrogant former city dwellers who, with rents rising and children growing, have moved reluctantly to the suburbs. Trapped by the “exhausting constant demands” of raising children, they juggle 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. They spend time with similarly minded urban exiles who have escaped the metropolis to drink negronis out of mason jars and judge each other closer to nature. Yet Cora's isolation in this new environment, it’s not because her own critical, joyless perspective but because her suburban peers are “dull and vain, even more so than in their previous urban life”.

Eliot is high-minded and oblivious. He snacks casually as she scrubs the oven and states he has no desire to own her. Cora imagines them attempting to endure a rustic life together, doing laundry by hand while he searches for chanterelles. She longs for drama, some moral abandon, a partner who will plead, and adore, and “express raw admiration for her prowess”.

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

The Problem of High-Minded Desire

The trouble is that she’s as high-minded and rigid as Eliot, 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). What she feels 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 refuses while Cora languishes. She imagines an alternate timeline running concurrent to her actual existence, where instead of bills and school pickups, she has sex and hotels and Sam. As this fantasy dims, her mind conjures “a Gallic character called Baptiste” who joins Sam in assisting her from the tub, “leaving her with no duties, no responsibilities, no requirements, except to be worshipped as a youthful bride, who’d died improbably of TB”.

A Sad Climax and Deeper Themes

When they eventually succumb to their desires, the sex is sad, without much play or complicity. It isn’t the sepia-toned romance she dreamed up for 10 years. Cora dons a slinky dress and Sam “performs oral sex with grim determination within their rented space” before dinner. The reader senses 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 possesses a sharp tongue, but a profound lack of happiness. Regarding an intimate picture from Sam, Cora complains, “he has clenched his abs and ensured he was aroused, but has not cleared the frame of Crocs”. Given that the catalyst that diminished their pleasure 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 acknowledge that sex isn’t always about babies. Eliot mentions a penis then admits it is not essential. Finally, he lands on, “you know genitals?”

Underpinning the narrative flows a quiet theme of common existential queries of midlife: do our lives have meaning? Where do we go after death? These ideas are more directly explored in Cora’s imagined conversations. Considering these passages, the reader may ponder what lesson Cora and her jaded circle would take from their disappointing dramas. Would Cora grow more receptive of life’s flawed pleasures, its sentimental delights? When Eliot asks about her affair during an audio program on bondage, Cora thinks “every serious exchange is undermined by its particulars”. Some might say enhanced. But that’s not Cora, and Somers doesn’t give the protagonist easy revelations, or stretch her where she is unable to go.

An Ultimate Assessment

The result is a razor-sharp, uproariously funny, finely observed novel, crafted with devastating precision. It is absolutely aware of itself, spare and brimming with subtext: a depiction of an anxious, loin-girding generation in middle age, chronically embarrassed, at once afraid of and desperate for sensation. Or maybe that’s just the New Yorkers. For the sake of argument, we'll assume so.