The Decade of Desire from Erin Somers: A Middle-Aged Infidelity Story This Era Has Earned.

In the novel by Erin Somers A Decade-Long Liaison, the story centers on Cora, a woman in her prime who craves a bygone kind of passion from a man of a different time. Sadly, for Cora, morality in 2015 is rigid and cynical, and instead of having the affair, Cora spends 10 years overthinking it, daydreaming of it and discussing it with the object of her desire, Sam – a father from her child's circle who works as “head narrative architect” at a fintech company. The book positions itself as a comic take on the traditional tale of infidelity and a sharp satire of a narrow, self-conscious group of economically slipping New Yorkers. It stands as the midlife adultery story this current cohort deserves: an energetic, clever critique of unbearably anxious individuals who’ve somehow spoiled intimacy itself.

Depicting Smug Discontent

Cora and her husband Eliot are smug, overeducated Brooklynites who, with rents rising and children growing, have relocated with hesitation to the suburbs. Caught in the “exhausting constant demands” of raising children, they juggle office careers, a pair of kids, and a persistent mushroom growing under their bathroom tiles which they cannot afford or muster the will to fix. They spend time with other smug, overeducated Brooklynites who have fled the city to drink negronis from rustic glassware and judge each other closer to nature. Yet Cora's isolation in this new environment, it’s not because her own critical, joyless perspective but because her suburban peers are “dull and vain, duller and vainer than they were back in the city”.

Eliot is intellectually lofty and utterly unaware. He eats popcorn while she cleans vigorously and states he has no desire to own her. Cora imagines herself trying to survive a rustic life together, doing laundry by hand while he forages for mushrooms. She longs for drama, some moral abandon, a lover who will plead, and adore, and “growl at the feet of the woman’s excellence”.

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

The Trouble with Over-Intellectualized Longing

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" (regarding her career, she says, but really about everything). What she feels for Sam are “tepid, barely beyond simple fondness”. 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 running concurrent to her actual existence, where instead of bills and school pickups, she has passion, luxury, and her imagined lover. When her fictional romance fizzles, she imagines “a Gallic character called Baptiste” who teams up with Sam in helping her out of the bath, “nothing for her to do, no tasks, no obligations, other than to be revered like someone’s teenage wife, tragically lost to illness”.

A Sad Climax and Deeper Themes

When they finally do give in to temptation, their intimacy is melancholy, without much play or complicity. It fails to be the nostalgically perfect affair she fantasized about for a full decade. Cora puts on an alluring gown and Sam “stoically eat[s] her out in their hotel room” prior to a meal. One imagines that Cora desires to slip inside a certain type of literary world, where intimacy is messy and ambiguous, where imbalances of control exist, and everyone misbehaves, and nobody keeps score.

Throughout the novel the core issue for Cora: 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 failed to remove his casual footwear from the shot”. Given that the catalyst that diminished their pleasure was parenthood, readers may fret about what these idiots are doing to their children. As her daughter inquires about sex, the adults fumble. They start with babies then acknowledge that sex isn’t always about babies. Eliot mentions a penis then admits it is not essential. Ultimately, he settles for, “you're aware of private parts?”

Underpinning the narrative flows a quiet theme of familiar middle-age questions: do our lives have meaning? Where do we go after death? These ideas are more directly explored in Cora's internal dialogues. Reading these exchanges, the reader may ponder what lesson Cora and her cynical lot would derive from their disappointing dramas. Might Cora become more receptive of life’s flawed pleasures, its sentimental delights? When Eliot asks 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 the author refuses to grant her character false epiphanies, or stretch her where she is unable to go.

A Final Appraisal

This is a razor-sharp, uproariously funny, exquisitely detailed novel, crafted with devastating precision. It is profoundly self-aware, spare and brimming with subtext: a portrait of an anxious, loin-girding generation in middle age, chronically embarrassed, at once afraid of and desperate for sensation. Perhaps this is solely a metropolitan trait. For the sake of argument, we'll assume so.