🔗 Share this article

Within the novel by Erin Somers A Decade-Long Liaison, the story centers on a millennial mother named Cora, a woman in her prime who craves a bygone kind of passion from a bygone kind of man. Unfortunately for her, morality in 2015 is rigid and cynical, so rather than embarking on the affair, Cora devotes a full decade obsessively analyzing it, fantasising about it and discussing it with the object of her desire, Sam – a playgroup dad who works as “chief storytelling officer” at a mortgage start-up. This novel positions itself as a humorous twist on the traditional tale of infidelity 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 has coming: a propulsive, witty takedown of insufferable hand-wringers who’ve managed to ruin intimacy itself.

A Portrait of Self-Satisfied Discontent

The central couple, Cora and Eliot are highly educated, somewhat arrogant former city dwellers who, with rents rising and children growing, have moved reluctantly upstate. Caught in the “exhausting constant demands” of parenthood, they juggle desk jobs, two children, and a persistent mushroom proliferating beneath their bathroom tiles which they cannot afford or muster the will to fix. Their social circle other smug, overeducated Brooklynites who have escaped the metropolis to sip craft cocktails from rustic glassware and judge each other amidst a more rural setting. But if Cora is lonely in this new environment, it stems not from her own critical, joyless perspective but because her suburban peers are “dull and vain, even more so than in their previous urban life”.

Her husband Eliot remains 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 a rustic life together, doing laundry by hand while he searches for chanterelles. She deeply desires excitement, some moral abandon, a partner who will plead, and adore, and “growl at the feet of the woman’s excellence”.

"The shabbiness of real life, you had to admire its consistency."

The Problem of High-Minded Longing

The trouble is that she’s as high-minded and rigid as Eliot, and incapable of that kind of abandon herself. She finds it "an overwhelming request to feel fervor" (about work, she claims, but really about everything). Her feelings for Sam are “tepid, barely beyond simple fondness”. She wants “a transcendent physical experience and not think about her life for a second”. But, for years, Sam refuses while Cora pines. She imagines a parallel reality alongside her real life, where in place of chores and errands, she has passion, luxury, and her imagined lover. As this fantasy dims, her mind conjures “a French guy named Baptiste” who joins Sam in helping her out of the bath, “leaving her with no duties, no responsibilities, no requirements, except to be worshipped like someone’s teenage wife, who’d died improbably of TB”.

A Sad Conclusion and Undercurrents

When they finally do give in to their desires, the sex is sad, without much play or complicity. It isn’t the nostalgically perfect affair she dreamed up for 10 years. Cora puts on a slinky dress and Sam “performs oral sex with grim determination within their rented space” before dinner. One imagines that Cora wants to inhabit a certain type of literary world, where sex is sordid and confusing, where the power dynamics are unequal, and characters act out, and nobody keeps score.

Somers consistently suggests the core issue for Cora: she has such cutting wit, but a profound lack of happiness. Of Sam’s erotic photo, Cora complains, “he has clenched his abs and ensured he was aroused, but has not cleared the frame of Crocs”. Given that the catalyst that diminished their pleasure 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 serves other purposes. The father references male anatomy then concedes that one isn’t required. Finally, he lands on, “you know genitals?”

Beneath the story runs the subtle undercurrent of familiar middle-age questions: do our lives have meaning? What follows our final breath? These themes are more explicit in Cora's internal dialogues. Reading these exchanges, one wonders what moral Cora and her cynical lot would derive from their unsatisfying escapades. Would Cora grow more open to life’s flawed pleasures, its corny pleasures? When Eliot asks about her affair in the middle of a podcast about rope, Cora reflects “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

The result is a razor-sharp, uproariously funny, exquisitely detailed novel, written with devastating precision. It is profoundly self-aware, economical yet rich with implication: a depiction of an anxious, loin-girding generation entering midlife, perpetually self-conscious, simultaneously terrified of and hungry for intense experience. Perhaps this is solely a metropolitan trait. For the sake of argument, we'll assume so.