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In the novel by Erin Somers A Decade-Long Liaison, the story centers on a millennial mother named Cora, a millennial mother who desperately wants a type of romance from another era with a bygone kind of man. Sadly, for Cora, morality in 2015 is rigid and cynical, so rather than embarking on the affair, Cora spends a full decade overthinking it, fantasising about it and discussing it with her potential lover, Sam – a playgroup dad who holds the title “head narrative architect” at a mortgage start-up. This novel positions itself as a comic take on the classic adultery novel and a send-up of a particular, self-aware clique of economically slipping New Yorkers. It stands as the definitive narrative of middle-aged unfaithfulness our entire generation deserves: an energetic, clever critique of insufferable hand-wringers who’ve managed to ruin intimacy itself.

Depicting Self-Satisfied Discontent

Cora and her husband Eliot are highly educated, somewhat arrogant former city dwellers who, as costs increased and their family expanded, have relocated with hesitation upstate. Caught in the “gruelling all-the-time-ness” of parenthood, they juggle desk jobs, a pair of kids, and an ongoing fungal issue proliferating beneath their bathroom tiles that they lack the energy and money to sort out. They spend time with similarly minded urban exiles who have fled the city to drink negronis 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, 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 says he doesn’t wish to possess her. Cora imagines them attempting to endure with Eliot in the woods, washing clothes on a stone while he searches for chanterelles. She longs for drama, some moral abandon, a partner who will beg, and adore, 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 Desire

The central conflict 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 claims, but in truth, about all aspects of life). What she feels for Sam are “bland, liking-adjacent”. She craves “to get fucked into the astral plane and escape her own reality momentarily”. Yet, for a decade, Sam refuses while Cora languishes. 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 joins Sam in assisting her from the tub, “nothing for her to do, no tasks, no requirements, except to be worshipped like someone’s teenage wife, who’d died improbably of TB”.

A Disappointing Conclusion and Undercurrents

When they eventually succumb to their desires, the sex is sad, lacking in fun or mutual connection. It isn’t the nostalgically perfect affair she dreamed up for a full decade. Cora dons a slinky dress and Sam “performs oral sex with grim determination within their rented space” before dinner. One imagines that Cora wants to slip inside a certain type of literary world, where intimacy is messy and ambiguous, where imbalances of control exist, and characters act out, and no one tallies the cost.

Somers consistently suggests the core issue for Cora: she has such cutting wit, but so little joy. Regarding an intimate picture from Sam, Cora complains, “he tightened his stomach and made sure he was hard, but has not cleared the frame of Crocs”. Since the event that diminished their pleasure was parenthood, readers may fret about the impact these flawed adults have on their kids. When Cora’s daughter asks 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. Finally, he lands on, “you're aware of private parts?”

Beneath the story flows a quiet theme of familiar middle-age questions: is there purpose to our existence? Where do we go after death? These ideas are more directly explored in Cora’s imagined conversations. Reading these exchanges, the reader may ponder what lesson Cora and her cynical lot would derive from their unsatisfying escapades. Might Cora become 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 thinks “every serious exchange is compromised by specific context”. Others could argue it's enriched. Yet that is not her nature, 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, hilarious, finely observed novel, crafted with such withering exactitude. It is absolutely aware of itself, spare and brimming with subtext: a depiction of a worried, self-protective cohort in middle age, chronically embarrassed, at once afraid of and desperate for sensation. Perhaps this is solely a metropolitan trait. Let’s say it is.