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Within the novel by Erin Somers A Decade-Long Liaison, we meet a millennial mother named Cora, a woman in her prime who craves a type of romance from another era with a man of a different time. Unfortunately for her, morality in 2015 is rigid and cynical, and instead of having the affair, Cora devotes 10 years overthinking it, daydreaming of it and talking it over with the object of her desire, Sam – a father from her child's circle who holds the title “chief storytelling officer” at a fintech company. This novel presents itself as a humorous twist 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 unbearably anxious individuals who’ve managed to ruin even sex.

Depicting 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 “gruelling all-the-time-ness” of parenthood, they juggle office careers, two children, 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 critique one another closer to nature. Yet Cora's isolation here, it stems not from her own critical, joyless perspective but because her suburban peers are “dull and vain, duller and vainer than they were back in the city”.

Eliot is high-minded and oblivious. He eats popcorn while she cleans vigorously and states he has no desire to own her. Cora imagines herself trying to survive with Eliot in the woods, doing laundry by hand while he searches for chanterelles. She longs for excitement, a bit of depravity, a lover who will beg, 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 Cora is just as intellectually constrained as her husband, and unable to surrender to primal passion. She finds it "an overwhelming request to feel fervor" (regarding her career, she says, but in truth, about all aspects of life). Her feelings for Sam are “tepid, barely beyond simple fondness”. She wants “to get fucked into the astral plane and escape her own reality momentarily”. But, for years, Sam refuses while Cora languishes. She constructs an alternate timeline alongside her real life, where instead of bills and school pickups, she has passion, luxury, and her imagined lover. When her fictional romance fizzles, she imagines “a Gallic character called Baptiste” who joins Sam in assisting her from the tub, “leaving her with no duties, no responsibilities, no obligations, except to be worshipped like someone’s teenage wife, tragically lost to illness”.

A Disappointing Conclusion and Undercurrents

When they eventually succumb to their desires, the sex is sad, lacking in fun or mutual connection. It isn’t the sepia-toned romance she fantasized about for 10 years. Cora puts on a slinky dress and Sam “stoically eat[s] her out within their rented space” prior to a meal. One imagines that Cora desires to slip inside 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.

Somers consistently suggests the core issue for Cora: she possesses a sharp tongue, but a profound lack of happiness. Regarding an intimate picture from Sam, Cora critiques, “he tightened his stomach and made sure he was hard, but failed to remove his casual footwear from the shot”. Since the event that killed their fun was parenthood, 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 concede that sex serves other purposes. The father references male anatomy then concedes that one isn’t required. Ultimately, he settles for, “you know genitals?”

Underpinning the narrative flows a quiet theme of common existential queries of midlife: is there purpose to our existence? What follows our final breath? These themes are more explicit in Cora's internal dialogues. Considering these passages, the reader may ponder what lesson Cora and her cynical lot would derive 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 “all meaningful communication is compromised by specific context”. Others could argue it's enriched. Yet that is not her nature, and Somers doesn’t give the protagonist easy revelations, or force growth beyond her capacity.

An Ultimate Assessment

The result is an incisive, uproariously funny, finely observed novel, written with such withering exactitude. It is absolutely aware of itself, 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. Perhaps this is solely a metropolitan trait. Let’s say it is.