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In Erin Somers’s A Decade-Long Liaison, the story centers on a millennial mother named Cora, a millennial mother who craves a bygone kind of passion with a man of a different time. Sadly, for Cora, morality in 2015 is inflexible and jaded, and instead of having the affair, Cora spends 10 years obsessively analyzing it, daydreaming of it and discussing it with her potential lover, Sam – a playgroup dad who works as “head narrative architect” at a mortgage start-up. This novel positions itself as a humorous twist on the classic adultery novel and a send-up of a narrow, self-conscious group of economically slipping New Yorkers. One could call it the midlife adultery story our entire generation deserves: a propulsive, witty takedown of insufferable hand-wringers who’ve managed to ruin intimacy itself.

Depicting Self-Satisfied Unhappiness

Cora and her husband Eliot are highly educated, somewhat arrogant former city dwellers who, with rents rising and children growing, have relocated with hesitation upstate. Trapped by the “gruelling all-the-time-ness” of raising children, they juggle desk jobs, a pair of kids, and a persistent mushroom proliferating beneath their bathroom tiles that they lack the energy and money to sort out. Their social circle other smug, overeducated Brooklynites who have escaped the metropolis to sip craft cocktails from rustic glassware and critique one another amidst a more rural setting. But if Cora is lonely here, it’s not because her own critical, joyless perspective but because her suburban peers are “dull and vain, duller and vainer than they were back in the city”.

Eliot is intellectually lofty and utterly unaware. He eats popcorn while she cleans vigorously and states he has no desire to own her. Cora imagines herself trying to survive a rustic life together, doing laundry by hand while he searches for chanterelles. She longs for drama, some moral abandon, a partner who will beg, 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 High-Minded Longing

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” (regarding her career, she says, but really about everything). Her feelings for Sam are “tepid, barely beyond simple fondness”. She wants “a transcendent physical experience and escape her own reality momentarily”. But, for years, Sam refuses while Cora pines. She imagines an alternate timeline running concurrent to her actual existence, where instead of bills and school pickups, she has passion, luxury, and her imagined lover. As this fantasy dims, her mind conjures “a Gallic character called Baptiste” who teams up with Sam in helping her out of the bath, “nothing for her to do, no tasks, no requirements, except to be worshipped as a youthful bride, tragically lost to illness”.

A Sad Climax and Deeper Themes

When they finally do give in to their desires, the sex is sad, without much play or complicity. It fails to be the nostalgically perfect affair she fantasized about for 10 years. Cora puts on an alluring gown and Sam “performs oral sex with grim determination within their rented space” prior to a meal. One imagines that Cora desires to inhabit a James Salter novel, where intimacy is messy and ambiguous, where imbalances of control exist, and characters act out, and no one tallies the cost.

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 made sure he was hard, but has not cleared the frame of Crocs”. Given that the catalyst that killed their fun was parenthood, one worries about the impact these flawed adults have on their kids. As her daughter inquires about sex, the parents stumble. They start with babies then acknowledge that sex isn’t always about babies. The father references male anatomy then admits it is not essential. Finally, he lands on, “you know genitals?”

Beneath the story flows a quiet theme of common existential queries of midlife: is there purpose to our existence? What follows our final breath? These themes are more directly explored in Cora's internal dialogues. Considering these passages, one wonders what moral Cora and her cynical lot 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 during an audio program on bondage, Cora thinks “every serious exchange is undermined by its particulars”. Others could argue it's enriched. But that’s not Cora, and Somers doesn’t give the protagonist easy revelations, or stretch her where she is unable to go.

A Final Assessment

This is an incisive, uproariously funny, finely observed novel, crafted with such withering exactitude. It is profoundly self-aware, economical yet rich with implication: a depiction of a worried, self-protective cohort entering midlife, chronically embarrassed, simultaneously terrified of and hungry for intense experience. Perhaps this is solely a metropolitan trait. For the sake of argument, we'll assume so.