The Decade of Desire by Erin Somers: A Middle-Aged Adultery Tale This Era Needs.

Within Erin Somers’s A Decade-Long Liaison, the story centers on Cora, a woman in her prime who yearns for a type of romance from another era from a man of a different time. Unfortunately for her, the modern ethical landscape is inflexible and jaded, and instead of having the affair, Cora spends a full decade obsessively analyzing it, daydreaming of it and discussing it with the object of her desire, Sam – a playgroup dad who holds the title “head narrative architect” at a fintech company. This novel presents itself as a humorous twist on the classic adultery novel and a send-up of a particular, self-aware clique of downwardly mobile New Yorkers. It stands as the midlife adultery story our entire generation has coming: an energetic, clever critique of insufferable hand-wringers who’ve somehow spoiled intimacy itself.

Depicting Smug Discontent

The central couple, Cora and Eliot are highly educated, somewhat arrogant former city dwellers who, as costs increased and their family expanded, have moved reluctantly upstate. Caught in the “gruelling all-the-time-ness” of parenthood, they juggle desk jobs, a pair of kids, and an ongoing fungal issue proliferating beneath 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 critique one another closer to nature. Yet Cora's isolation here, it’s not because 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”.

Eliot is intellectually lofty and utterly unaware. He snacks casually while she cleans vigorously and says he doesn’t wish to possess her. Cora imagines herself trying to survive a rustic life together, washing clothes on a stone while he searches for chanterelles. She deeply desires excitement, some moral abandon, a lover who will beg, and worship, and “express raw admiration for her prowess”.

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

The Problem of High-Minded Desire

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 “tepid, barely beyond simple fondness”. She wants “to get fucked into the astral plane and not think about her life for a second”. But, for years, Sam demurs while Cora pines. She imagines 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, she imagines “a Gallic character called Baptiste” who joins Sam in assisting her from the tub, “leaving her with no duties, no responsibilities, no requirements, other than to be revered like someone’s teenage wife, tragically lost to illness”.

A Sad Conclusion 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 10 years. Cora dons an alluring gown and Sam “performs oral sex with grim determination in their hotel room” prior to a meal. The reader senses 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.

Somers consistently suggests the core issue for Cora: she possesses a sharp tongue, but so little joy. Of Sam’s erotic photo, Cora complains, “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 killed their fun was having children, readers may fret about the impact these flawed adults have on their kids. As her daughter inquires about sex, the parents stumble. They start with babies then acknowledge that sex isn’t always about babies. Eliot mentions a penis then concedes that one isn’t required. Finally, he lands on, “you know genitals?”

Beneath the story runs the subtle undercurrent 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, one wonders what lesson Cora and her jaded circle would derive from their disappointing dramas. Would Cora grow more open to life’s imperfect joys, its corny pleasures? When Eliot asks about her affair in the middle of a podcast about rope, Cora reflects “every serious exchange is undermined by its particulars”. Others could argue it's enriched. Yet that is not her nature, and the author refuses to grant her character false epiphanies, or force growth beyond her capacity.

A Final Assessment

This is a razor-sharp, hilarious, exquisitely detailed novel, written with devastating precision. It is absolutely aware of itself, spare and brimming with subtext: a portrait 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. Let’s say it is.