🔗 Share this article

In Erin Somers’s A Decade-Long Liaison, we meet a millennial mother named Cora, a millennial mother who craves a bygone kind of passion from a man of a different time. Unfortunately for her, morality in 2015 is rigid and cynical, so rather than embarking on the affair, Cora devotes 10 years obsessively analyzing it, fantasising about it and talking it over with her potential lover, 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 comic take on the traditional tale of infidelity and a send-up of a narrow, self-conscious group of economically slipping New Yorkers. It stands as the midlife adultery story this current cohort has coming: an energetic, clever critique of unbearably anxious individuals who’ve somehow spoiled even sex.

A Portrait of Smug Unhappiness

The central couple, Cora and Eliot are highly educated, somewhat arrogant former city dwellers who, with rents rising and children growing, have relocated with hesitation to the suburbs. Caught in the “exhausting constant demands” of parenthood, they juggle office careers, two children, and an ongoing fungal issue proliferating beneath their bathroom tiles that they lack the energy and money to sort out. They spend time with other smug, overeducated Brooklynites who have fled the city to drink negronis from rustic glassware and critique one another amidst a more rural setting. Yet Cora's isolation in this new environment, it’s not because her own critical, joyless perspective but because her new neighbours are “boring and self-absorbed, duller and vainer than they were back in the city”.

Her husband Eliot remains high-minded and oblivious. He eats popcorn as she scrubs the oven 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 forages for mushrooms. She longs for excitement, a bit of depravity, a lover who will beg, and worship, and “express raw admiration for her prowess”.

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

The Trouble with Over-Intellectualized 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" (about work, she says, but really about everything). Her feelings for Sam are “bland, liking-adjacent”. She wants “a transcendent physical experience and not think about her life for a second”. Yet, for a decade, Sam demurs while Cora languishes. She constructs a parallel reality alongside her real life, where instead of bills and school pickups, she has sex and hotels and Sam. As this fantasy dims, her mind conjures “a French guy named Baptiste” who joins Sam in helping her out of the bath, “leaving her with no duties, 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 finally do give in to temptation, their intimacy is melancholy, 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 in their hotel room” before dinner. One imagines that Cora desires to slip inside a James Salter novel, where sex is sordid and confusing, where imbalances of control exist, and everyone misbehaves, and no one tallies the cost.

Throughout the novel the root of Cora’s problem: she has such cutting wit, 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 killed their fun was having children, one worries 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 isn’t always about babies. The father references male anatomy then admits it is not essential. Ultimately, he settles for, “you're aware of private parts?”

Underpinning the narrative flows a quiet theme of familiar middle-age questions: is there purpose to our existence? What follows our final breath? These themes are more explicit in Cora’s imagined conversations. Reading these exchanges, the reader may ponder what moral Cora and her cynical lot would derive from their disappointing dramas. Would Cora grow more open to life’s flawed pleasures, its corny pleasures? When Eliot asks about her affair during an audio program on bondage, Cora thinks “all meaningful communication is compromised by specific context”. Some might say enhanced. But that’s not Cora, and the author refuses to grant the protagonist easy revelations, or force growth beyond her capacity.

An Ultimate Appraisal

The result is a razor-sharp, uproariously funny, exquisitely detailed novel, crafted with such withering exactitude. It is profoundly self-aware, spare and brimming with subtext: a portrait of a worried, self-protective cohort entering midlife, perpetually self-conscious, at once afraid of and desperate for sensation. Perhaps this is solely a metropolitan trait. For the sake of argument, we'll assume so.