The Decade of Desire from author Erin Somers: A Midlife Adultery Story Our Generation Needs.

Within the novel by Erin Somers A Decade-Long Liaison, the story centers on Cora, a woman in her prime who craves a type of romance from another era from a bygone kind of man. Unfortunately for her, the modern ethical landscape is inflexible and jaded, and instead of having the affair, Cora devotes 10 years obsessively analyzing it, daydreaming of it and discussing it with her potential lover, Sam – a father from her child's circle who works as “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 downwardly mobile New Yorkers. It stands as the definitive narrative of middle-aged unfaithfulness this current cohort has coming: a propulsive, witty takedown of unbearably anxious individuals who’ve managed to ruin even sex.

Depicting Smug Discontent

Cora and her husband Eliot are smug, overeducated Brooklynites who, with rents rising and children growing, have relocated with hesitation upstate. Caught in the “gruelling all-the-time-ness” of parenthood, they have desk jobs, a pair of kids, 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 fled the city to sip craft cocktails out of mason jars and judge each other amidst a more rural setting. But if Cora is lonely here, it stems not from her own critical, joyless perspective but because her new neighbours are “boring and self-absorbed, even more so than in their previous urban life”.

Her husband Eliot remains intellectually lofty and utterly unaware. He snacks casually as she scrubs the oven and says he doesn’t wish to possess her. Cora imagines herself trying to survive with Eliot in the woods, washing clothes on a stone while he forages for mushrooms. She deeply desires drama, some moral abandon, a partner who will plead, and adore, and “express raw admiration for her prowess”.

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

The Problem of Over-Intellectualized Longing

The trouble is that Cora is just as intellectually constrained as her husband, and unable to surrender to primal passion. She finds it "an overwhelming request to feel fervor" (regarding her career, she claims, but really about everything). 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”. Yet, for a decade, Sam demurs while Cora languishes. 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, her mind conjures “a French guy named Baptiste” who teams up with Sam in assisting her from the tub, “nothing for her to do, no tasks, no obligations, except to be worshipped as a youthful bride, tragically lost to illness”.

A Disappointing Climax and Deeper Themes

When they finally do give in to temptation, their intimacy is melancholy, without much play or complicity. It isn’t the nostalgically perfect affair she dreamed up for a full decade. Cora puts on a slinky dress and Sam “stoically eat[s] her out in their hotel room” before dinner. One imagines that Cora wants to slip inside a certain type of literary world, where sex is sordid and confusing, where imbalances of control exist, and everyone misbehaves, and no one tallies the cost.

Throughout the novel the core issue for Cora: she has such cutting wit, but a profound lack of happiness. Of Sam’s erotic photo, Cora critiques, “he has clenched his abs 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, one worries about what these idiots are doing to their children. When Cora’s daughter asks about sex, the adults fumble. They start with babies then acknowledge that sex serves other purposes. The father references male anatomy then concedes that one isn’t required. Finally, he lands on, “you're aware of private parts?”

Underpinning the narrative flows a quiet theme of familiar middle-age questions: is there purpose to our existence? What follows our final breath? These themes are more explicit in Cora’s imagined conversations. Reading these exchanges, one wonders what lesson Cora and her jaded circle would derive from their unsatisfying escapades. Would Cora grow more receptive of life’s flawed pleasures, its corny pleasures? Upon being questioned by Eliot about her affair in the middle of a podcast about rope, Cora reflects “every serious exchange is undermined by its particulars”. Some might say enhanced. But that’s not Cora, and Somers doesn’t give the protagonist easy revelations, or force growth beyond her capacity.

A Final Appraisal

The result is an incisive, uproariously funny, exquisitely detailed novel, written with devastating precision. 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.