🔗 Share this article A Decade-Long Liaison by author Erin Somers: A Middle-Aged Adultery Tale Our Generation Deserves. Within Erin Somers’s A Decade-Long Liaison, we meet Cora, a woman in her prime who craves a type of romance from another era with a man of a different time. Unfortunately for her, morality in 2015 is rigid and cynical, so rather than embarking on the affair, Cora spends 10 years overthinking it, fantasising about it and talking it over with the object of her desire, Sam – a playgroup dad who holds the title “chief storytelling officer” at a fintech company. This novel positions itself as a humorous twist on the classic adultery novel and a sharp satire of a particular, self-aware clique of economically slipping New Yorkers. It stands as the midlife adultery story this current cohort 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 smug, overeducated Brooklynites who, as costs increased and their family expanded, have relocated with hesitation upstate. Caught in the “exhausting constant demands” of raising children, they juggle desk jobs, two children, and an ongoing fungal issue proliferating beneath 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 drink negronis from rustic glassware and judge each other amidst a more rural setting. But if Cora is lonely in this new environment, it stems not from her own critical, joyless perspective but because her suburban peers are “boring and self-absorbed, duller and vainer than they were back in the city”. Her husband Eliot remains intellectually lofty and utterly unaware. He snacks casually while she cleans vigorously and states he has no desire to own her. In her mind, Cora pictures herself trying to survive with Eliot in the woods, doing laundry by hand while he searches for chanterelles. She deeply desires excitement, a bit of depravity, a lover who will beg, and adore, and “express raw admiration for her prowess”. "The mundane grind of everyday existence, one must acknowledge its relentless predictability." The Problem of Over-Intellectualized Desire The trouble is that she’s as high-minded and rigid as Eliot, and unable to surrender to primal passion. It’s “too much to ask her to be passionate” (about work, she claims, but in truth, about all aspects of life). Her feelings for Sam are “bland, liking-adjacent”. She craves “a transcendent physical experience and escape her own reality momentarily”. Yet, for a decade, Sam demurs while Cora pines. She constructs an alternate timeline alongside her real life, where instead of bills and school pickups, she has sex and hotels and Sam. When her fictional romance fizzles, her mind conjures “a French guy named Baptiste” who teams up with 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, tragically lost to illness”. A Sad Conclusion and Undercurrents When they finally do give in to their desires, their intimacy is melancholy, 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 “stoically eat[s] her out in their hotel room” prior to a meal. One imagines that Cora desires to inhabit a James Salter novel, where sex is sordid and confusing, where imbalances of control exist, and characters act out, and no one tallies the cost. Somers consistently suggests the core issue for Cora: she possesses a sharp tongue, but a profound lack of happiness. Of Sam’s erotic photo, Cora complains, “he has clenched his abs and made sure he was hard, but failed to remove his casual footwear from the shot”. 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 isn’t always about babies. 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? What follows our final breath? These themes are more explicit in Cora’s imagined conversations. Reading these exchanges, one wonders what lesson Cora and her jaded circle would derive from their unsatisfying escapades. Would Cora grow more open to life’s flawed pleasures, its sentimental delights? When Eliot asks about her affair during an audio program on bondage, Cora thinks “every serious exchange is compromised by specific context”. Others could argue it's enriched. But that’s not Cora, and Somers doesn’t give her character false epiphanies, or force growth beyond her capacity. An Ultimate Assessment The result is an incisive, hilarious, exquisitely detailed novel, crafted 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, simultaneously terrified of and hungry for intense experience. Perhaps this is solely a metropolitan trait. For the sake of argument, we'll assume so.