The Decade of Desire by author Erin Somers: A Midlife Adultery Tale Our Era Has Earned.
Within Erin Somers’s A Decade-Long Liaison, we meet Cora, a millennial mother 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 spends 10 years overthinking 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 positions itself as a humorous twist on the classic adultery novel and a sharp satire of a narrow, self-conscious group of downwardly mobile New Yorkers. It stands as the midlife adultery story this current cohort deserves: a propulsive, witty takedown of insufferable hand-wringers who’ve somehow spoiled even sex.
Depicting Self-Satisfied Unhappiness
Cora and her husband Eliot are smug, overeducated Brooklynites who, as costs increased and their family expanded, have relocated with hesitation to the suburbs. Trapped by the “exhausting constant demands” of raising children, they have desk jobs, a pair of kids, and a persistent mushroom growing under 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 out of mason jars and critique one another amidst a more rural setting. Yet Cora's isolation in this new environment, it stems not from her own critical, joyless perspective but because her suburban peers are “dull and vain, even more so than in their previous urban life”.
Her husband Eliot remains high-minded and oblivious. He snacks casually 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 lover who will beg, and worship, and “express raw admiration for her prowess”.
"The mundane grind of everyday existence, you had to admire its consistency."
The Trouble with High-Minded Longing
The central conflict is that Cora is just as intellectually constrained as her husband, and unable to surrender to primal passion. It’s “too much to ask her to be passionate” (about work, she says, 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 escape her own reality momentarily”. But, for years, Sam refuses while Cora pines. She constructs a parallel reality alongside her real life, where in place of chores and errands, she has passion, luxury, and her imagined lover. As this fantasy dims, her mind conjures “a Gallic character called Baptiste” who teams up with Sam in helping her out of the bath, “leaving her with no duties, no responsibilities, no requirements, other than to be revered as a youthful bride, who’d died improbably of TB”.
A Sad Conclusion and Undercurrents
When they eventually succumb to temptation, their intimacy is melancholy, lacking in fun or mutual connection. It fails to be the nostalgically perfect affair she dreamed up for 10 years. Cora dons an alluring gown and Sam “stoically eat[s] her out in their hotel room” prior to a meal. The reader senses that Cora desires to inhabit a James Salter novel, where intimacy is messy and ambiguous, where the power dynamics are unequal, and everyone misbehaves, and nobody keeps score.
Throughout the novel the root of Cora’s problem: she possesses a sharp tongue, 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”. Since the event that killed their fun was parenthood, readers may fret about the impact these flawed adults have on their kids. When Cora’s daughter asks 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. Finally, he lands on, “you're aware of private parts?”
Beneath the story flows a quiet theme of common existential queries of midlife: do our lives have meaning? Where do we go after death? These ideas are more explicit in Cora’s imagined conversations. Reading these exchanges, one wonders what lesson Cora and her jaded circle would take from their disappointing dramas. Would Cora grow more receptive of life’s imperfect joys, its corny pleasures? Upon being questioned by Eliot about her affair during an audio program on bondage, Cora reflects “every serious exchange is undermined by its particulars”. Others could argue it's enriched. But that’s not Cora, and Somers doesn’t give her character false epiphanies, or stretch her where she is unable to go.
A Final Assessment
The result is an incisive, hilarious, exquisitely detailed novel, crafted with devastating precision. It is absolutely aware of itself, economical yet rich with implication: 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.
