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In Erin Somers’s A Decade-Long Liaison, the story centers on Cora, a millennial mother who yearns for a bygone kind of passion from a bygone kind of man. Unfortunately for her, morality in 2015 is inflexible and jaded, so rather than embarking on the affair, Cora devotes a full decade obsessively analyzing it, daydreaming of it and discussing it with her potential lover, Sam – a father from her child's circle who works as “chief storytelling officer” at a mortgage start-up. The book presents itself as a comic take on the classic adultery novel and a send-up of a narrow, self-conscious group of downwardly mobile New Yorkers. One could call it the definitive narrative of middle-aged unfaithfulness our entire generation deserves: an energetic, clever critique of insufferable hand-wringers who’ve somehow spoiled intimacy itself.

Depicting Smug Discontent

The central couple, Cora and Eliot are highly educated, somewhat arrogant former city dwellers who, with rents rising and children growing, have moved reluctantly upstate. Caught in the “exhausting constant demands” of parenthood, they juggle desk jobs, two children, and a persistent mushroom proliferating beneath their bathroom tiles which they cannot afford or muster the will to fix. They spend time with similarly minded urban exiles who have fled the city to drink negronis out of mason jars and critique one another amidst a more rural setting. Yet Cora's isolation in this new environment, it’s not because her own critical, joyless perspective but because her new neighbours are “boring and self-absorbed, even more so than in their previous urban life”.

Eliot is intellectually lofty and utterly unaware. He eats popcorn as she scrubs the oven and says he doesn’t wish to possess her. Cora imagines them attempting to endure a rustic life together, washing clothes on a stone while he searches for chanterelles. She longs for excitement, a bit of depravity, a partner who will beg, and worship, and “express raw admiration for her prowess”.

"The mundane grind of everyday existence, you had to admire its consistency."

The Trouble with Over-Intellectualized Longing

The trouble is that she’s as high-minded and rigid as Eliot, and incapable of that kind of abandon herself. She finds it "an overwhelming request to feel fervor" (about work, she claims, but in truth, about all aspects of life). What she feels for Sam are “tepid, barely beyond simple fondness”. She craves “to get fucked into the astral plane and escape her own reality momentarily”. But, for years, Sam refuses 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, her mind conjures “a Gallic character called Baptiste” who teams up with Sam in assisting her from the tub, “nothing for her to do, no responsibilities, no obligations, other than to be revered as a youthful bride, who’d died improbably of TB”.

A Sad Climax and Deeper Themes

When they finally do give in to temptation, their intimacy is melancholy, lacking in fun or mutual connection. It fails to be the sepia-toned romance she fantasized about for a full decade. Cora dons an alluring gown and Sam “stoically eat[s] her out within their rented space” prior to a meal. One imagines that Cora wants to slip inside a certain type of literary world, where intimacy is messy and ambiguous, where the power dynamics are unequal, and characters act out, and nobody keeps score.

Throughout the novel the core issue for Cora: she possesses a sharp tongue, but so little joy. Of Sam’s erotic photo, Cora critiques, “he tightened his stomach and made sure he was hard, but has not cleared the frame of Crocs”. Since the event that killed their fun was parenthood, one worries about what these idiots are doing to their children. When Cora’s daughter asks about sex, the adults fumble. They begin with procreation then concede that sex serves other purposes. Eliot mentions a penis then concedes that one isn’t required. Ultimately, he settles for, “you know genitals?”

Underpinning the narrative runs the subtle undercurrent of familiar middle-age questions: do our lives have meaning? Where do we go after death? These themes 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. Would Cora grow more open to life’s imperfect joys, its sentimental delights? When Eliot asks about her affair during an audio program on bondage, Cora thinks “all meaningful communication is undermined by its particulars”. Others could argue it's enriched. But that’s not Cora, and Somers doesn’t give the protagonist easy revelations, or force growth beyond her capacity.

A Final Assessment

The result is an incisive, uproariously funny, finely observed novel, written 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, perpetually self-conscious, at once afraid of and desperate for sensation. Perhaps this is solely a metropolitan trait. Let’s say it is.