A Decade-Long Liaison from author Erin Somers: The Middle-Aged Infidelity Story Our Generation Has Earned.

In the novel by Erin Somers A Decade-Long Liaison, we meet a millennial mother named Cora, a woman in her prime who yearns for a bygone kind of passion from a bygone kind of man. Sadly, for Cora, the modern ethical landscape is rigid and cynical, and instead of having the affair, Cora spends 10 years overthinking it, fantasising about it and discussing it with her potential lover, Sam – a father from her child's circle who holds the title “chief storytelling officer” at a mortgage start-up. The book positions 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. One could call it the midlife adultery story this current cohort deserves: a propulsive, witty takedown of insufferable hand-wringers who’ve managed to ruin even sex.

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 relocated with hesitation to the suburbs. Caught in the “gruelling all-the-time-ness” of parenthood, they juggle desk jobs, a pair of kids, and a persistent mushroom growing under their bathroom tiles which they cannot afford or muster the will to fix. Their social circle other smug, overeducated Brooklynites who have fled the city to sip craft cocktails out of mason jars and judge each other amidst a more rural setting. Yet Cora's isolation 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”.

Eliot is intellectually lofty and utterly unaware. He eats popcorn as she scrubs the oven and states he has no desire to own her. In her mind, Cora pictures them attempting to endure with Eliot in the woods, washing clothes on a stone while he forages for mushrooms. She longs for excitement, a bit of depravity, a partner who will beg, and worship, and “express raw admiration for her prowess”.

"The shabbiness of real life, you had to admire its consistency."

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" (regarding her career, she says, but really about everything). What she feels for Sam are “bland, liking-adjacent”. She wants “to get fucked into the astral plane and not think about her life for a second”. But, for years, Sam refuses while Cora languishes. She constructs a parallel reality alongside her real life, where in place of chores and errands, she has sex and hotels and Sam. As this fantasy dims, she imagines “a French guy named Baptiste” who teams up with Sam in helping her out of the bath, “leaving her with no duties, no tasks, no requirements, except to be worshipped as a youthful bride, who’d died improbably of TB”.

A Sad Climax and Undercurrents

When they finally do give in to temptation, their intimacy is melancholy, without much play or complicity. It isn’t the sepia-toned romance she dreamed up for a full decade. Cora puts on an alluring gown and Sam “performs oral sex with grim determination within their rented space” prior to a meal. One imagines that Cora wants 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 possesses a sharp tongue, but so little joy. Of Sam’s erotic photo, Cora critiques, “he has clenched his abs 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, one worries about the impact these flawed adults have on their kids. As her daughter inquires about sex, the parents stumble. They begin with procreation then concede that sex isn’t always about babies. The father references male anatomy then admits it is not essential. Finally, he lands on, “you're aware of private parts?”

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. Reading these exchanges, the reader may ponder what lesson Cora and her jaded circle would derive from their disappointing dramas. Would Cora grow more receptive of life’s imperfect joys, its sentimental delights? Upon being questioned by Eliot about her affair in the middle of a podcast about rope, Cora thinks “all meaningful communication is compromised by specific context”. Some might say enhanced. Yet that is not her nature, and Somers doesn’t give the protagonist easy revelations, or stretch her where she is unable to go.

A Final Assessment

The result is a razor-sharp, uproariously funny, finely observed novel, crafted with devastating precision. It is absolutely aware of itself, spare and brimming with subtext: a depiction of a worried, self-protective cohort entering midlife, chronically embarrassed, at once afraid of and desperate for sensation. Or maybe that’s just the New Yorkers. For the sake of argument, we'll assume so.