A Decade-Long Liaison from author Erin Somers: A Midlife Adultery Tale This Era Deserves.
In the novel by Erin Somers A Decade-Long Liaison, we meet a millennial mother named Cora, a woman in her prime who desperately wants a bygone kind of passion with a bygone kind of man. Sadly, for Cora, the modern ethical landscape is rigid and cynical, so rather than embarking on the affair, Cora spends a full decade obsessively analyzing it, daydreaming of it and discussing it with her potential lover, Sam – a playgroup dad who works as “head narrative architect” at a fintech company. This novel positions 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. It stands as the midlife adultery story this current cohort deserves: a propulsive, witty takedown of unbearably anxious individuals who’ve somehow spoiled even sex.
A Portrait of Self-Satisfied Unhappiness
Cora and her husband Eliot are smug, overeducated Brooklynites who, as costs increased and their family expanded, have moved reluctantly to the suburbs. Trapped by the “gruelling all-the-time-ness” of raising children, they juggle desk jobs, a pair of kids, and a persistent mushroom 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 drink negronis from rustic glassware and critique one another amidst a more rural setting. Yet Cora's isolation here, 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 high-minded and oblivious. He eats popcorn while she cleans vigorously and says he doesn’t wish to possess her. In her mind, Cora pictures herself trying to survive with Eliot in the woods, washing clothes on a stone while he searches for chanterelles. She deeply desires excitement, some moral abandon, 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 Trouble with High-Minded Longing
The trouble 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 escape her own reality momentarily”. But, for years, Sam demurs while Cora pines. She imagines a parallel reality alongside her real life, where in place of chores and errands, she has sex and hotels and Sam. When her fictional romance fizzles, she imagines “a French guy named Baptiste” who joins Sam in assisting her from the tub, “nothing for her to do, no responsibilities, no requirements, except to be worshipped like someone’s teenage wife, tragically lost to illness”.
A Disappointing 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 fantasized about for a full decade. Cora dons 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 the power dynamics are unequal, and everyone misbehaves, and nobody keeps score.
Throughout the novel the core issue for Cora: she possesses a sharp tongue, but a profound lack of happiness. Regarding an intimate picture from Sam, Cora complains, “he tightened his stomach and made sure he was hard, but failed to remove his casual footwear from the shot”. Since the event that diminished their pleasure was parenthood, readers may fret about what these idiots are doing to their children. When Cora’s daughter asks about sex, the parents stumble. They begin with procreation then acknowledge that sex serves other purposes. The father references male anatomy then concedes that one isn’t required. Ultimately, he settles for, “you're aware of private parts?”
Beneath the story flows a quiet theme of common existential queries of midlife: is there purpose to our existence? Where do we go after death? These ideas are more explicit in Cora’s imagined conversations. Considering these passages, one wonders what lesson Cora and her jaded circle would derive from their disappointing dramas. Might Cora become more open to life’s imperfect joys, its sentimental delights? When Eliot asks about her affair in the middle of a podcast about rope, Cora thinks “every serious exchange 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.
An Ultimate 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, chronically embarrassed, simultaneously terrified of and hungry for intense experience. Perhaps this is solely a metropolitan trait. Let’s say it is.
