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Within the novel by Erin Somers A Decade-Long Liaison, the story centers on a millennial mother named Cora, a millennial mother who yearns for a bygone kind of passion with a bygone kind of man. Sadly, for Cora, the modern ethical landscape is inflexible and jaded, 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 playgroup dad who holds the title “head narrative architect” at a mortgage start-up. This novel 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. One could call it the definitive narrative of middle-aged unfaithfulness our entire generation deserves: a propulsive, witty takedown of insufferable hand-wringers who’ve somehow spoiled even sex.

Depicting Self-Satisfied Unhappiness

Cora and her husband Eliot are highly educated, somewhat arrogant former city dwellers who, as costs increased and their family expanded, have moved reluctantly to the suburbs. Trapped by the “gruelling all-the-time-ness” of raising children, they juggle office careers, two children, and an ongoing fungal issue growing under their bathroom tiles that they lack the energy and money to sort out. Their social circle 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’s not because her fussy, lifeless lens but because her new neighbours are “boring and self-absorbed, even more so than in their previous urban life”.

Eliot is intellectually lofty and utterly unaware. He snacks casually while she cleans vigorously and says he doesn’t wish to possess 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, a bit of depravity, a partner 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 Over-Intellectualized Desire

The trouble is that Cora is just as intellectually constrained as her husband, and incapable of that kind of abandon herself. It’s “too much to ask her to be passionate” (about work, she says, but really about everything). Her feelings for Sam are “bland, liking-adjacent”. She craves “to get fucked into the astral plane and escape her own reality momentarily”. But, for years, Sam demurs while Cora languishes. She imagines a parallel reality running concurrent to her actual existence, where instead of bills and school pickups, 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 assisting her from the tub, “nothing for her to do, no tasks, no requirements, other than to be revered like someone’s teenage wife, tragically lost to illness”.

A Disappointing Climax and Deeper Themes

When they finally do give in to temptation, their intimacy is melancholy, without much play or complicity. It isn’t the nostalgically perfect affair she dreamed up for a full decade. Cora dons an alluring gown and Sam “stoically eat[s] her out within their rented space” prior to a meal. The reader senses that Cora wants to slip inside a James Salter novel, where sex is sordid and confusing, where the power dynamics are unequal, and characters act out, and nobody keeps score.

Throughout the novel 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 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, 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 acknowledge that sex isn’t always about babies. Eliot mentions a penis then admits it is not essential. Ultimately, he settles for, “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 imagined conversations. Reading these exchanges, the reader may ponder what lesson Cora and her jaded circle would take from their disappointing dramas. Would Cora grow more open to life’s imperfect joys, its sentimental delights? Upon being questioned by Eliot about her affair in the middle of a podcast about rope, Cora reflects “every serious exchange is undermined by its particulars”. Others could argue it's enriched. But that’s not Cora, and the author refuses to grant the protagonist easy revelations, or stretch her where she is unable to go.

An Ultimate Assessment

This is a razor-sharp, hilarious, exquisitely detailed novel, written with devastating precision. It is absolutely aware of itself, spare and brimming with subtext: a depiction of an anxious, loin-girding generation entering midlife, perpetually self-conscious, at once afraid of and desperate for sensation. Perhaps this is solely a metropolitan trait. Let’s say it is.