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Within the novel by Erin Somers A Decade-Long Liaison, the story centers on Cora, a millennial mother who craves a bygone kind of passion from a bygone kind of man. Unfortunately for her, the modern ethical landscape is inflexible and jaded, and instead of having the affair, Cora spends a full decade obsessively analyzing it, daydreaming of it and discussing it with her potential lover, Sam – a playgroup dad who holds the title “chief storytelling officer” at a mortgage start-up. The book presents itself as a humorous twist on the classic adultery novel and a sharp satire of a narrow, self-conscious group of economically slipping New Yorkers. It stands as the midlife adultery story our entire generation deserves: an energetic, clever critique of insufferable hand-wringers who’ve somehow spoiled intimacy itself.

A Portrait of Self-Satisfied Discontent

The central couple, Cora and Eliot are smug, overeducated Brooklynites who, with rents rising and children growing, have relocated with hesitation upstate. Trapped by the “exhausting constant demands” of raising children, they have desk jobs, a pair of kids, and an ongoing fungal issue proliferating beneath their bathroom tiles that they lack the energy and money to sort out. Their social circle other smug, overeducated Brooklynites who have fled the city to sip craft cocktails from rustic glassware and judge each other closer to nature. But if Cora is lonely 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”.

Her husband Eliot remains high-minded and oblivious. 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, doing laundry by hand while he forages for mushrooms. She deeply desires drama, a bit of depravity, a lover who will beg, and adore, and “express raw admiration for her prowess”.

"The mundane grind of everyday existence, you had to admire its consistency."

The Trouble with Over-Intellectualized Desire

The central conflict is that she’s as high-minded and rigid as Eliot, and incapable of that kind of abandon herself. It’s “too much to ask her to be passionate” (regarding her career, she claims, but in truth, about all aspects of life). What she feels 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 pines. She constructs a parallel reality running concurrent to her actual existence, where instead of bills and school pickups, she has sex and hotels and Sam. As this fantasy dims, her mind conjures “a Gallic character called Baptiste” who joins Sam in helping her out of the bath, “leaving her with no duties, no responsibilities, no requirements, other than to be revered like someone’s teenage wife, who’d died improbably of TB”.

A Disappointing Climax and Deeper Themes

When they finally do give in to temptation, the sex is sad, without much play or complicity. It isn’t the nostalgically perfect affair she fantasized about for a full decade. Cora dons a slinky dress and Sam “performs oral sex with grim determination within their rented space” before dinner. The reader senses that Cora desires to inhabit a James Salter novel, where sex is sordid and confusing, where the power dynamics are unequal, and everyone misbehaves, and nobody keeps score.

Throughout the novel the root of Cora’s problem: she has such cutting wit, but a profound lack of happiness. Regarding an intimate picture from Sam, 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 killed their fun was having children, readers may fret about what these idiots are doing to their children. As her daughter inquires about sex, the adults fumble. They start with babies then acknowledge that sex serves other purposes. Eliot mentions a penis then admits it is not essential. Ultimately, he settles for, “you know genitals?”

Beneath the story flows a quiet theme of familiar middle-age questions: is there purpose to our existence? What follows our final breath? These ideas are more explicit in Cora’s imagined conversations. Reading these exchanges, the reader may ponder what lesson Cora and her cynical lot would take from their unsatisfying escapades. Might Cora become more open to life’s imperfect joys, its corny pleasures? Upon being questioned by Eliot about her affair during an audio program on bondage, Cora reflects “all meaningful communication is undermined by its particulars”. Some might say enhanced. But that’s not Cora, and the author refuses to grant her character false epiphanies, or stretch her where she is unable to go.

An Ultimate Assessment

This is a razor-sharp, uproariously funny, exquisitely detailed novel, crafted with such withering exactitude. It is absolutely aware of itself, spare and brimming with subtext: a depiction of a worried, self-protective cohort entering midlife, perpetually self-conscious, simultaneously terrified of and hungry for intense experience. Or maybe that’s just the New Yorkers. Let’s say it is.