🔗 Share this article

Within Erin Somers’s A Decade-Long Liaison, the story centers on a millennial mother named Cora, a millennial mother who craves a type of romance from another era from a bygone kind of man. Unfortunately for her, morality in 2015 is inflexible and jaded, so rather than embarking on the affair, Cora spends a full decade obsessively analyzing it, daydreaming of it and discussing it with the object of her desire, Sam – a father from her child's circle who holds the title “head narrative architect” at a mortgage start-up. The book presents itself as a humorous twist on the traditional tale of infidelity and a sharp satire of a narrow, self-conscious group of economically slipping New Yorkers. One could call it the midlife adultery story this current cohort deserves: an energetic, clever critique of insufferable hand-wringers who’ve somehow spoiled even sex.

A Portrait of Smug Discontent

The central couple, Cora and Eliot are smug, overeducated Brooklynites who, as costs increased and their family expanded, have moved reluctantly to the suburbs. Caught in the “exhausting constant demands” of raising children, they have 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 sip craft cocktails from rustic glassware and judge each other closer to nature. But if Cora is lonely in this new environment, it stems not from her own critical, joyless perspective but because her new neighbours are “dull and vain, even more so than in their previous urban life”.

Eliot is intellectually lofty and utterly unaware. He snacks casually as she scrubs the oven and says he doesn’t wish to possess her. Cora imagines them attempting to endure a rustic life together, washing clothes on a stone while he forages for mushrooms. She longs for drama, a bit of depravity, a partner who will beg, and worship, and “express raw admiration for her prowess”.

"The mundane grind of everyday existence, one must acknowledge its relentless predictability."

The Problem of Over-Intellectualized Desire

The trouble is that she’s as high-minded and rigid as Eliot, and unable to surrender to primal passion. It’s “too much to ask her to be passionate” (about work, she says, but in truth, about all aspects of life). Her feelings for Sam are “bland, liking-adjacent”. She craves “a transcendent physical experience and not think about her life for a second”. Yet, for a decade, Sam demurs while Cora languishes. She constructs an alternate timeline running concurrent to her actual existence, where in place of chores and errands, she has sex and hotels and Sam. When her fictional romance fizzles, her mind conjures “a Gallic character called Baptiste” who teams up with Sam in helping her out of the bath, “leaving her with no duties, no responsibilities, no requirements, other than to be revered as a youthful bride, tragically lost to illness”.

A Disappointing Climax and Deeper Themes

When they eventually succumb to their desires, their intimacy is melancholy, lacking in fun or mutual connection. It fails to be the sepia-toned romance she dreamed up for 10 years. Cora dons an alluring gown and Sam “stoically eat[s] her out within their rented space” before dinner. The reader senses that Cora wants to slip inside a certain type of literary world, where intimacy is messy and ambiguous, where imbalances of control exist, and everyone misbehaves, and no one tallies the cost.

Somers consistently suggests 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 failed to remove his casual footwear from the shot”. Since the event that killed their fun 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. The father references male anatomy 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: do our lives have meaning? Where do we go after death? These themes are more directly explored in Cora's internal dialogues. Considering these passages, the reader may ponder what moral Cora and her jaded circle would derive from their disappointing dramas. Might Cora become more open to life’s flawed pleasures, its corny pleasures? Upon being questioned by Eliot 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 her character false epiphanies, or stretch her where she is unable to go.

A Final Appraisal

This is an incisive, uproariously funny, exquisitely detailed novel, written with such withering exactitude. It is absolutely aware of itself, economical yet rich with implication: a depiction of an anxious, loin-girding generation in middle age, perpetually self-conscious, at once afraid of and desperate for sensation. Or maybe that’s just the New Yorkers. Let’s say it is.