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Within the novel by Erin Somers A Decade-Long Liaison, we meet a millennial mother named Cora, a millennial mother who yearns for a type of romance from another era from a man of a different time. Unfortunately for her, the modern ethical landscape is inflexible and jaded, so rather than embarking on the affair, Cora devotes a full decade overthinking it, fantasising about it and discussing it with the object of her desire, Sam – a father from her child's circle who works as “head narrative architect” 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 particular, self-aware clique of downwardly mobile New Yorkers. It stands as the definitive narrative of middle-aged unfaithfulness this current cohort has coming: an energetic, clever critique of unbearably anxious individuals who’ve managed to ruin intimacy itself.

A Portrait of Smug Unhappiness

The central couple, Cora and Eliot are highly educated, somewhat arrogant former city dwellers who, as costs increased and their family expanded, have moved reluctantly upstate. Caught in the “exhausting constant demands” of raising children, they juggle office careers, two children, and an ongoing fungal issue growing under 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. Yet Cora's isolation in this new environment, it stems not from her own critical, joyless perspective but because her new neighbours 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 says he doesn’t wish to possess her. In her mind, Cora pictures herself trying to survive a rustic life together, washing clothes on a stone while he searches for chanterelles. She longs for excitement, some moral abandon, a lover who will beg, and worship, and “express raw admiration for her prowess”.

"The mundane grind of everyday existence, one must acknowledge its relentless predictability."

The Trouble with High-Minded Longing

The central conflict is that Cora is just as intellectually constrained as her husband, and unable to surrender to primal passion. It’s “too much to ask her to be passionate” (about work, she says, but really about everything). What she feels for Sam are “tepid, barely beyond simple fondness”. She craves “a transcendent physical experience and not think about her life for a second”. But, for years, Sam demurs while Cora pines. She imagines a parallel reality alongside her real life, where instead of bills and school pickups, she has passion, luxury, and her imagined lover. As this fantasy dims, she imagines “a Gallic character called Baptiste” who joins Sam in helping her out of the bath, “leaving her with no duties, no tasks, no obligations, except to be worshipped as a youthful bride, who’d died improbably of TB”.

A Sad Conclusion and Deeper Themes

When they eventually succumb to their desires, their intimacy is melancholy, lacking in fun or mutual connection. It fails to be the sepia-toned romance she dreamed up for a full decade. Cora dons an alluring gown and Sam “performs oral sex with grim determination within their rented space” before dinner. One imagines that Cora desires to inhabit a James Salter novel, where intimacy is messy and ambiguous, where the power dynamics are unequal, and characters act out, and no one tallies the cost.

Throughout the novel the root of Cora’s problem: she has such cutting wit, but a profound lack of happiness. Of Sam’s erotic photo, Cora critiques, “he tightened his stomach and ensured he was aroused, but failed to remove his casual footwear from the shot”. Given that the catalyst 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 concede that sex isn’t always about babies. The father references male anatomy then admits it is not essential. Ultimately, he settles for, “you know genitals?”

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 explicit in Cora’s imagined conversations. Considering these passages, one wonders what moral Cora and her jaded circle would take from their unsatisfying escapades. Might Cora become more open to life’s flawed pleasures, its sentimental delights? When Eliot asks 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 the author refuses to grant the protagonist easy revelations, or force growth beyond her capacity.

An Ultimate Appraisal

The result is an incisive, hilarious, exquisitely detailed novel, crafted 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. For the sake of argument, we'll assume so.