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Within the novel by Erin Somers A Decade-Long Liaison, the story centers on Cora, a woman in her prime who yearns for a bygone kind of passion from a bygone kind of man. Sadly, for Cora, morality in 2015 is rigid and cynical, so rather than embarking on the affair, Cora devotes a full decade obsessively analyzing it, daydreaming of it and discussing it with the object of her desire, Sam – a playgroup dad who holds the title “head narrative architect” at a fintech company. The book positions itself as a humorous twist on the traditional tale of infidelity and a sharp satire of a narrow, self-conscious group of downwardly mobile New Yorkers. It stands as the definitive narrative of middle-aged unfaithfulness our entire generation has coming: a propulsive, witty takedown of unbearably anxious individuals who’ve somehow spoiled even sex.

A Portrait of Self-Satisfied Unhappiness

Cora and her husband Eliot are smug, overeducated Brooklynites who, with rents rising and children growing, have relocated with hesitation to the suburbs. Caught in the “gruelling all-the-time-ness” of raising children, they juggle desk jobs, two children, and a persistent mushroom growing under their bathroom tiles which they cannot afford or muster the will to fix. They spend time with other smug, overeducated Brooklynites who have fled the city 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 fussy, lifeless lens 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 them attempting to endure with Eliot in the woods, doing laundry by hand while he searches for chanterelles. She longs for drama, some moral abandon, a partner who will plead, and worship, and “growl at the feet of the woman’s excellence”.

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

The Problem of Over-Intellectualized Longing

The central conflict 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). What she feels for Sam are “tepid, barely beyond simple fondness”. She wants “a transcendent physical experience and not think about her life for a second”. Yet, for a decade, Sam refuses while Cora pines. She constructs an alternate timeline alongside her real life, 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 helping her out of the bath, “nothing for her to do, no responsibilities, no obligations, except to be worshipped like someone’s teenage wife, who’d died improbably of TB”.

A Disappointing Conclusion and Deeper Themes

When they eventually succumb to temptation, their intimacy is melancholy, without much play or complicity. It isn’t the nostalgically perfect affair she fantasized about for 10 years. Cora puts on an alluring gown and Sam “stoically eat[s] her out in their hotel room” prior to a meal. The reader senses that Cora wants to inhabit a certain type of literary world, where sex is sordid and confusing, where imbalances of control exist, and everyone misbehaves, and nobody keeps score.

Throughout the novel the root of Cora’s problem: she possesses a sharp tongue, but a profound lack of happiness. Of Sam’s erotic photo, Cora complains, “he tightened his stomach and made sure he was hard, but has not cleared the frame of Crocs”. Since the event that diminished their pleasure was having children, readers may fret about the impact these flawed adults have on their kids. When Cora’s daughter asks about sex, the adults fumble. They begin with procreation then acknowledge that sex serves other purposes. 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: is there purpose to our existence? Where do we go after death? These ideas are more directly explored in Cora's internal dialogues. Considering these passages, the reader may ponder what moral Cora and her cynical lot would take from their unsatisfying escapades. Might Cora become more receptive of life’s flawed pleasures, its sentimental delights? When Eliot asks about her affair in the middle of a podcast about rope, Cora reflects “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 her character false epiphanies, or force growth beyond her capacity.

An Ultimate Appraisal

This is a razor-sharp, 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 entering midlife, chronically embarrassed, simultaneously terrified of and hungry for intense experience. Perhaps this is solely a metropolitan trait. Let’s say it is.