In Erin Somers’s A Decade-Long Liaison, the story centers on Cora, a millennial mother who yearns for a type of romance from another era from a bygone kind of man. Unfortunately for her, the modern ethical landscape is rigid and cynical, and instead of having the affair, Cora devotes a full decade overthinking it, fantasising about it and discussing it with her potential lover, Sam – a playgroup dad who works as “chief storytelling officer” at a mortgage start-up. This novel positions itself as a humorous twist on the traditional tale of infidelity and a sharp satire of a narrow, self-conscious group of downwardly mobile 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.
Depicting Smug Unhappiness
Cora and her husband Eliot are highly educated, somewhat arrogant former city dwellers who, as costs increased and their family expanded, have moved reluctantly to the suburbs. Caught in the “exhausting constant demands” of raising children, they juggle office careers, a pair of kids, and an ongoing fungal issue proliferating beneath their bathroom tiles which they cannot afford or muster the will to fix. Their social circle similarly minded urban exiles who have fled the city to sip craft cocktails out of mason jars and judge each other amidst a more rural setting. But if Cora is lonely here, it stems not from her own critical, joyless perspective but because her new neighbours are “boring and self-absorbed, duller and vainer than they were back in the city”.
Eliot is high-minded and oblivious. He eats popcorn as she scrubs the oven and says he doesn’t wish to possess her. In her mind, Cora pictures them attempting to endure a rustic life together, doing laundry by hand while he searches for chanterelles. She deeply desires excitement, some moral abandon, a lover who will plead, and worship, and “express raw admiration for her prowess”.
"The shabbiness of real life, one must acknowledge its relentless predictability."
The Trouble with 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. She finds it "an overwhelming request to feel fervor" (about work, she claims, but in truth, about all aspects of life). Her feelings for Sam are “tepid, barely beyond simple fondness”. She craves “a transcendent physical experience and not think about her life for a second”. Yet, for a decade, Sam demurs while Cora languishes. 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. As this fantasy dims, she imagines “a Gallic character called Baptiste” who teams up with Sam in helping her out of the bath, “leaving her with no duties, no responsibilities, no requirements, other than to be revered like someone’s teenage wife, tragically lost to illness”.
A Disappointing 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 puts on an alluring gown and Sam “stoically eat[s] her out within their rented space” 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 root of Cora’s problem: she has such cutting wit, but a profound lack of happiness. Regarding an intimate picture from Sam, Cora critiques, “he tightened his stomach and made sure he was hard, but has not cleared the frame of Crocs”. Given that the catalyst that killed their fun was having children, readers may fret about what these idiots are doing to their children. As her daughter inquires about sex, the adults fumble. They begin with procreation then acknowledge that sex isn’t always about babies. Eliot mentions a penis then concedes that one isn’t required. Ultimately, he settles for, “you're aware of private parts?”
Beneath the story runs the subtle undercurrent 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. Considering these passages, the reader may ponder what moral Cora and her cynical lot would take from their disappointing dramas. Would Cora grow more receptive of life’s imperfect joys, its corny pleasures? Upon being questioned by Eliot about her affair in the middle of a podcast about rope, Cora reflects “all meaningful communication 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 Appraisal
The result is an incisive, hilarious, 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 entering midlife, chronically embarrassed, simultaneously terrified of and hungry for intense experience. Perhaps this is solely a metropolitan trait. For the sake of argument, we'll assume so.
