The Decade of Desire from author Erin Somers: The Middle-Aged Infidelity Tale This Era Needs.

Within Erin Somers’s A Decade-Long Liaison, we meet Cora, a woman in her prime who yearns for a bygone kind of passion with a man of a different time. Unfortunately for her, morality in 2015 is inflexible and jaded, and instead of having the affair, Cora devotes 10 years obsessively analyzing it, daydreaming of it and discussing it with the object of her desire, Sam – a playgroup dad who holds the title “chief storytelling officer” at a fintech company. This novel presents itself as a comic take on the classic adultery novel and a sharp satire of a particular, self-aware clique of economically slipping New Yorkers. One could call it the definitive narrative of middle-aged unfaithfulness our entire generation has coming: a propulsive, witty takedown of unbearably anxious individuals who’ve managed to ruin even sex.

A Portrait of Smug Unhappiness

Cora and her husband Eliot are highly educated, somewhat arrogant former city dwellers who, with rents rising and children growing, have moved reluctantly to the suburbs. Trapped by the “exhausting constant demands” of raising children, they have desk jobs, two children, and an ongoing fungal issue growing under their bathroom tiles which they cannot afford or muster the will to fix. They spend time with similarly minded urban exiles who have escaped the metropolis to sip craft cocktails out of mason jars and judge each other amidst a more rural setting. But if Cora is lonely in this new environment, it’s not because her fussy, lifeless lens but because her new neighbours are “dull and vain, duller and vainer than they were back in the city”.

Her husband Eliot remains high-minded and oblivious. He snacks casually while she cleans vigorously and states he has no desire to own her. Cora imagines them attempting to endure with Eliot in the woods, doing laundry by hand while he searches for chanterelles. She longs for drama, some moral abandon, a partner who will plead, and adore, and “growl at the feet of the woman’s excellence”.

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

The Trouble with Over-Intellectualized Longing

The central conflict is that she’s as high-minded and rigid as Eliot, 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 not think about her life for a second”. Yet, for a decade, Sam demurs while Cora pines. 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, her mind conjures “a French guy named Baptiste” who joins 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 Deeper Themes

When they eventually succumb to their desires, the sex is sad, without much play or complicity. It fails to be the sepia-toned romance she fantasized about for 10 years. Cora puts on an alluring gown and Sam “performs oral sex with grim determination in their hotel room” prior to a meal. One imagines that Cora desires to slip inside a James Salter novel, where sex is sordid and confusing, 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 so little joy. Regarding an intimate picture from Sam, Cora complains, “he has clenched his abs and ensured he was aroused, but failed to remove his casual footwear from the shot”. Since the event that diminished their pleasure was parenthood, one worries 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 concede that sex isn’t always about babies. Eliot mentions a penis 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? What follows our final breath? These ideas are more directly explored in Cora's internal dialogues. Considering these passages, the reader may ponder what moral Cora and her jaded circle would take 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. But that’s not Cora, and the author refuses to grant the protagonist easy revelations, or stretch her where she is unable to go.

A Final Appraisal

This 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 entering midlife, chronically embarrassed, at once afraid of and desperate for sensation. Perhaps this is solely a metropolitan trait. Let’s say it is.