🔗 Share this article

Within the novel by Erin Somers A Decade-Long Liaison, we meet Cora, a millennial mother who yearns for a bygone kind of passion with a man of a different time. Sadly, for Cora, morality in 2015 is inflexible and jaded, so rather than embarking on the affair, Cora spends 10 years obsessively analyzing it, daydreaming of it and talking it over with her potential lover, Sam – a father from her child's circle who works as “head narrative architect” at a fintech company. This novel presents itself as a humorous twist on the classic adultery novel and a send-up of a narrow, self-conscious group of economically slipping New Yorkers. It stands as the midlife adultery story our entire generation deserves: a propulsive, witty takedown of insufferable hand-wringers who’ve somehow spoiled even sex.

A Portrait of Self-Satisfied 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 “gruelling all-the-time-ness” of raising children, they have 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 similarly minded urban exiles who have fled the city to sip craft cocktails from rustic glassware and judge each other closer to nature. But if Cora is lonely in this new environment, it’s not because 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 them attempting to endure with Eliot in the woods, doing laundry by hand while he forages for mushrooms. She longs for excitement, some moral abandon, a lover who will beg, and worship, and “growl at the feet of the woman’s excellence”.

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

The Problem of High-Minded Longing

The trouble is that she’s as high-minded and rigid as Eliot, and unable to surrender to primal passion. She finds it "an overwhelming request to feel fervor" (about work, she says, but really about everything). Her feelings for Sam are “tepid, barely beyond simple fondness”. She craves “to get fucked into the astral plane and not think about her life for a second”. But, for years, Sam demurs while Cora pines. 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, she imagines “a French guy named Baptiste” who joins Sam in helping her out of the bath, “leaving her with no duties, no responsibilities, no obligations, other than to be revered like someone’s teenage wife, who’d died improbably of TB”.

A Sad Conclusion and Undercurrents

When they finally do give in to temptation, the sex is sad, without much play or complicity. It fails to be the sepia-toned romance she dreamed up for 10 years. Cora puts on a slinky dress and Sam “performs oral sex with grim determination in their hotel room” before dinner. The reader senses that Cora desires to slip inside a James Salter novel, 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 critiques, “he tightened his stomach and made sure he was hard, but failed to remove his casual footwear from the shot”. Given that the catalyst that diminished their pleasure was parenthood, readers may fret about the impact these flawed adults have on their kids. As her daughter inquires about sex, the parents stumble. 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 runs the subtle undercurrent of familiar middle-age questions: is there purpose to our existence? Where do we go after death? These themes are more directly explored in Cora’s imagined conversations. Considering these passages, the reader may ponder what lesson Cora and her cynical lot would take from their unsatisfying escapades. Would Cora grow more receptive of life’s imperfect joys, its sentimental delights? When Eliot asks about her affair during an audio program on bondage, Cora reflects “every serious exchange is undermined by its particulars”. Some might say enhanced. But that’s not Cora, and the author refuses to grant the protagonist easy revelations, or force growth beyond her capacity.

A Final Assessment

The result is an incisive, uproariously funny, finely observed novel, crafted with such withering exactitude. It is absolutely aware of itself, spare and brimming with subtext: a portrait of a worried, self-protective cohort in middle age, perpetually self-conscious, simultaneously terrified of and hungry for intense experience. Or maybe that’s just the New Yorkers. Let’s say it is.