A Decade-Long Liaison by Erin Somers: The Middle-Aged Adultery Tale Our Generation Needs.

Within Erin Somers’s A Decade-Long Liaison, we meet Cora, a woman in her prime who desperately wants a type of romance from another era 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 obsessively analyzing it, fantasising about it and talking it over with the object of her desire, Sam – a father from her child's circle who works as “chief storytelling officer” at a fintech company. This novel presents itself as a comic take on the traditional tale of infidelity and a send-up of a narrow, self-conscious group of downwardly mobile New Yorkers. It stands as the midlife adultery story this current cohort has coming: a propulsive, witty takedown of insufferable hand-wringers who’ve managed to ruin even sex.

A Portrait of Smug Discontent

The central couple, Cora and Eliot are smug, overeducated Brooklynites who, with rents rising and children growing, have moved reluctantly to the suburbs. Caught in the “exhausting constant demands” of raising children, they juggle office careers, two children, and an ongoing fungal issue proliferating beneath their bathroom tiles that they lack the energy and money to sort out. Their social circle similarly minded urban exiles who have fled the city to drink negronis out of mason jars 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 “boring and self-absorbed, even more so than in their previous urban life”.

Her husband Eliot remains high-minded and oblivious. He snacks casually as she scrubs the oven and says he doesn’t wish to possess her. Cora imagines them attempting to endure with Eliot in the woods, washing clothes on a stone while he forages for mushrooms. She deeply desires excitement, a bit of depravity, a partner who will beg, and worship, and “growl at the feet of the woman’s excellence”.

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

The Problem of High-Minded Longing

The central conflict is that Cora is just as intellectually constrained as her husband, and incapable of that kind of abandon herself. It’s “too much to ask her to be passionate” (regarding her career, she claims, but in truth, about all aspects of life). What she feels for Sam are “bland, liking-adjacent”. She wants “to get fucked into the astral plane and escape her own reality momentarily”. But, for years, Sam refuses while Cora languishes. She constructs a parallel reality 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 helping her out of the bath, “nothing for her to do, no responsibilities, no obligations, except to be worshipped like someone’s teenage wife, who’d died improbably of TB”.

A Sad Climax and Deeper Themes

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 fantasized about for a full decade. 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 desires to inhabit a certain type of literary world, where intimacy is messy and ambiguous, where imbalances of control exist, and everyone misbehaves, and nobody keeps score.

Somers consistently suggests the root of Cora’s problem: she possesses a sharp tongue, 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”. Since the event that killed their fun was having children, readers may fret about the impact these flawed adults have on their kids. When Cora’s daughter asks about sex, the parents stumble. They begin with procreation then acknowledge that sex serves other purposes. Eliot mentions a penis then concedes that one isn’t required. 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. Reading these exchanges, one wonders what moral Cora and her jaded circle would take from their disappointing dramas. Might Cora become more open to life’s imperfect joys, its sentimental delights? Upon being questioned by Eliot about her affair during an audio program on bondage, Cora reflects “every serious exchange is compromised by specific context”. Others could argue it's enriched. But that’s not Cora, and the author refuses to grant the protagonist easy revelations, or force growth beyond her capacity.

A Final Appraisal

This is an incisive, 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 in middle age, 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.