🔗 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 yearns for a type of romance from another era with a man of a different time. 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 talking it over with her potential lover, Sam – a playgroup dad who holds the title “head narrative architect” at a fintech company. The book 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 definitive narrative of middle-aged unfaithfulness this current cohort deserves: a propulsive, witty takedown of insufferable hand-wringers who’ve managed to ruin intimacy itself.

A Portrait of Smug 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. Caught in the “exhausting constant demands” of parenthood, they have 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 fled the city to drink negronis from rustic glassware and critique one another closer to nature. But if Cora is lonely here, it’s not because her fussy, lifeless lens but because her suburban peers are “dull and vain, even more so than in their previous urban life”.

Eliot is high-minded and oblivious. He snacks casually while she cleans vigorously and states he has no desire to own her. Cora imagines them attempting to endure with Eliot in the woods, doing laundry by hand while he forages for mushrooms. She deeply desires 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, you had to admire its consistency."

The Problem of High-Minded 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 imagines a parallel reality running concurrent to her actual existence, where instead of bills and school pickups, she has passion, luxury, and her imagined lover. When her fictional romance fizzles, she imagines “a French guy named Baptiste” who joins Sam in assisting her from the tub, “leaving her with no duties, no tasks, no requirements, except to be worshipped as a youthful bride, tragically lost to illness”.

A Disappointing Climax and Undercurrents

When they eventually succumb to temptation, their intimacy is melancholy, lacking in fun or mutual connection. It isn’t the nostalgically perfect affair she dreamed up for 10 years. Cora puts on a slinky dress and Sam “stoically eat[s] her out within their rented space” prior to a meal. The reader senses 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 no one tallies the cost.

Somers consistently suggests the core issue for Cora: she possesses a sharp tongue, but a profound lack of happiness. Of Sam’s erotic photo, Cora complains, “he tightened his stomach and ensured he was aroused, but has not cleared the frame of Crocs”. Given that the catalyst that killed their fun was having children, readers may fret about the impact these flawed adults have on their kids. When Cora’s daughter asks 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. Finally, he lands on, “you know genitals?”

Underpinning the narrative flows a quiet theme of common existential queries of midlife: is there purpose to our existence? Where do we go after death? These ideas are more directly explored in Cora's internal dialogues. Considering these passages, the reader may ponder what moral Cora and her cynical lot would take from their unsatisfying escapades. Might Cora become more receptive of life’s flawed pleasures, its sentimental delights? When Eliot asks about her affair in the middle of a podcast about rope, Cora reflects “all meaningful communication is compromised by specific context”. 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.

A Final Assessment

This is a razor-sharp, hilarious, exquisitely detailed novel, crafted with devastating precision. It is absolutely aware of itself, economical yet rich with implication: a depiction of a worried, self-protective cohort 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.