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Within Erin Somers’s A Decade-Long Liaison, the story centers on Cora, a woman in her prime who craves a type of romance from another era with a man of a different time. Sadly, for Cora, the modern ethical landscape is rigid and cynical, so rather than embarking on the affair, Cora spends a full decade obsessively analyzing it, daydreaming of it and talking it over with the object of her desire, Sam – a playgroup dad who holds the title “head narrative architect” at a mortgage start-up. The book presents itself as a humorous twist on the classic adultery novel and a send-up of a narrow, self-conscious group of economically slipping New Yorkers. It stands as the definitive narrative of middle-aged unfaithfulness this current cohort deserves: an energetic, clever critique of insufferable hand-wringers who’ve managed to ruin even sex.

A Portrait of Smug Unhappiness

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 raising children, they have office careers, a pair of kids, and an ongoing fungal issue growing under their bathroom tiles which they cannot afford or muster the will to fix. Their social circle similarly minded urban exiles who have escaped the metropolis to sip craft cocktails from rustic glassware and judge each other amidst a more rural setting. Yet Cora's isolation here, it’s not because 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”.

Eliot is intellectually lofty and utterly unaware. He eats popcorn while she cleans vigorously 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, a bit of depravity, a lover who will plead, 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 claims, but really about everything). 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”. But, for years, Sam refuses while Cora pines. She constructs a parallel reality running concurrent to her actual existence, where in place of chores and errands, she has passion, luxury, and her imagined lover. When her fictional romance fizzles, her mind conjures “a French guy named Baptiste” who teams up with Sam in assisting her from the tub, “leaving her with no duties, no tasks, no requirements, except to be worshipped like someone’s teenage wife, tragically lost to illness”.

A Disappointing Climax and Deeper Themes

When they finally do give in to their desires, their intimacy is melancholy, without much play or complicity. It fails to be the nostalgically perfect affair she dreamed up for 10 years. Cora dons an alluring gown 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 sex is sordid and confusing, where the power dynamics are unequal, and characters act out, and no one tallies the cost.

Throughout the novel the core issue for Cora: she has such cutting wit, but so little joy. Of Sam’s erotic photo, Cora complains, “he tightened his stomach and made sure he was hard, but failed to remove his casual footwear from the shot”. Since the event 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 adults fumble. They begin with procreation then concede that sex isn’t always about babies. The father references male anatomy then concedes that one isn’t required. Ultimately, he settles for, “you're aware of private parts?”

Beneath the story runs the subtle undercurrent of familiar middle-age questions: is there purpose to our existence? Where do we go after death? These ideas are more explicit in Cora’s imagined conversations. Reading these exchanges, the reader may ponder what moral Cora and her cynical lot would take from their disappointing dramas. Would Cora grow more receptive of 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 Somers doesn’t give her character false epiphanies, or force growth beyond her capacity.

An Ultimate Assessment

The result is an incisive, uproariously funny, finely observed novel, crafted with such withering exactitude. It is profoundly self-aware, spare and brimming with subtext: a depiction of a worried, self-protective cohort in middle age, perpetually self-conscious, simultaneously terrified of and hungry for intense experience. Or maybe that’s just the New Yorkers. Let’s say it is.