🔗 Share this article

Within Erin Somers’s A Decade-Long Liaison, we meet Cora, a woman in her prime who desperately wants a bygone kind of passion with a man of a different time. Unfortunately for her, morality in 2015 is rigid and cynical, so rather than embarking on the affair, Cora spends a full decade obsessively analyzing it, daydreaming of 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. The book presents itself as a humorous twist on the traditional tale of infidelity and a sharp satire of a narrow, self-conscious group of economically slipping New Yorkers. It stands as the definitive narrative of middle-aged unfaithfulness our entire generation deserves: a propulsive, witty takedown of unbearably anxious individuals who’ve somehow spoiled intimacy itself.

A Portrait of Smug Discontent

The central couple, Cora and Eliot are smug, overeducated Brooklynites who, as costs increased and their family expanded, have relocated with hesitation to the suburbs. Caught in the “gruelling all-the-time-ness” of parenthood, they juggle office careers, a pair of kids, and an ongoing fungal issue growing under their bathroom tiles that they lack the energy and money to sort out. They spend time with other smug, overeducated Brooklynites who have escaped the metropolis to sip craft cocktails from rustic glassware and judge each other closer to nature. Yet Cora's isolation in this new environment, it’s not because her fussy, lifeless lens but because her new neighbours are “boring and self-absorbed, even more so than in their previous urban life”.

Eliot is high-minded and oblivious. He snacks casually as she scrubs the oven and states he has no desire to own her. Cora imagines herself trying to survive a rustic life together, washing clothes on a stone while he forages for mushrooms. She deeply desires excitement, some moral abandon, a partner who will plead, and adore, and “express raw admiration for her prowess”.

"The shabbiness of real life, one must acknowledge its relentless predictability."

The Trouble with High-Minded Longing

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” (about work, she claims, but in truth, about all aspects of life). Her feelings for Sam are “bland, liking-adjacent”. She wants “to get fucked into the astral plane and not think about her life for a second”. Yet, for a decade, Sam refuses while Cora pines. She imagines an alternate timeline alongside her real life, where instead of bills and school pickups, she has sex and hotels and Sam. As this fantasy dims, she imagines “a French guy named Baptiste” who joins Sam in assisting her from the tub, “nothing for her to do, no tasks, no requirements, other than to be revered like someone’s teenage wife, who’d died improbably of TB”.

A Disappointing Conclusion and Undercurrents

When they eventually succumb to temptation, the sex is sad, without much play or complicity. It fails to be the nostalgically perfect affair she dreamed up for 10 years. Cora dons a slinky dress and Sam “performs oral sex with grim determination in their hotel room” prior to a meal. The reader senses that Cora wants to inhabit a certain type of literary world, where intimacy is messy and ambiguous, where the power dynamics are unequal, and everyone misbehaves, 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. Of Sam’s erotic photo, Cora critiques, “he has clenched his abs and ensured he was aroused, but failed to remove his casual footwear from the shot”. Since the event that diminished their pleasure was having children, one worries about the impact these flawed adults have on their kids. As her daughter inquires about sex, the adults fumble. They begin with procreation 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 familiar middle-age questions: is there purpose to our existence? What follows our final breath? These ideas are more directly explored in Cora’s imagined conversations. Reading these exchanges, one wonders what lesson Cora and her jaded circle would take from their disappointing dramas. Might Cora become more open to life’s imperfect joys, its corny pleasures? Upon being questioned by Eliot about her affair during an audio program on bondage, Cora thinks “every serious exchange is undermined by its particulars”. Some might say enhanced. Yet that is not her nature, and Somers doesn’t give the protagonist easy revelations, or force growth beyond her capacity.

A Final Assessment

This is an incisive, hilarious, exquisitely detailed novel, written with such withering exactitude. It is absolutely aware of itself, economical yet rich with implication: a depiction of a worried, self-protective cohort entering midlife, perpetually self-conscious, simultaneously terrified of and hungry for intense experience. Or maybe that’s just the New Yorkers. For the sake of argument, we'll assume so.