The Decade of Desire by author Erin Somers: The Middle-Aged Adultery Tale Our Generation Has Earned.

In Erin Somers’s A Decade-Long Liaison, we meet Cora, a woman in her prime who craves a bygone kind of passion with a man of a different time. Sadly, for Cora, morality in 2015 is rigid and cynical, so rather than embarking on the affair, Cora devotes 10 years obsessively analyzing it, fantasising about it and talking it over with the object of her desire, Sam – a father from her child's circle who holds the title “head narrative architect” at a mortgage start-up. This novel positions itself as a humorous twist on the classic adultery novel and a send-up of a narrow, self-conscious group of economically slipping New Yorkers. It stands as the midlife adultery story our entire generation has coming: a propulsive, witty takedown of unbearably anxious individuals who’ve somehow spoiled even sex.

A Portrait of Self-Satisfied Discontent

The central couple, Cora and Eliot are smug, overeducated Brooklynites 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, two children, and an ongoing fungal issue proliferating beneath their bathroom tiles that they lack the energy and money to sort out. Their social circle other smug, overeducated Brooklynites 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 new neighbours are “dull and vain, duller and vainer than they were back in the city”.

Eliot is intellectually lofty and utterly unaware. He eats popcorn as she scrubs the oven and states he has no desire to own her. In her mind, Cora pictures them attempting to endure with Eliot in the woods, doing laundry by hand while he forages for mushrooms. She longs for excitement, a bit of depravity, a partner who will beg, and adore, and “express raw admiration for her prowess”.

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

The Trouble with High-Minded Desire

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 claims, but in truth, about all aspects of life). Her feelings for Sam are “bland, liking-adjacent”. She craves “a transcendent physical experience and not think about her life for a second”. Yet, for a decade, Sam demurs while Cora languishes. She imagines a parallel reality 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 French guy named Baptiste” who joins Sam in helping her out of the bath, “nothing for her to do, no tasks, no obligations, other than to be revered as a youthful bride, tragically lost to illness”.

A Sad Conclusion and Deeper Themes

When they eventually succumb to temptation, their intimacy is melancholy, lacking in fun or mutual connection. It fails to be the sepia-toned romance she fantasized about for 10 years. Cora dons an alluring gown and Sam “stoically eat[s] her out in their hotel room” before dinner. The reader senses that Cora desires to inhabit 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 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 start with babies 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 runs the subtle undercurrent of common existential queries of midlife: do our lives have meaning? What follows our final breath? These themes are more explicit 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 sentimental delights? Upon being questioned by Eliot about her affair during an audio program on bondage, Cora thinks “every serious exchange is undermined by its particulars”. Others could argue it's enriched. Yet that is not her nature, and Somers doesn’t give the protagonist easy revelations, or force growth beyond her capacity.

A Final Appraisal

This is an incisive, hilarious, exquisitely detailed 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, 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.