Booksology If you strongly connected with the overarching conceit of “All Fours,” but couldn’t quite relate to that book’s iconoclastic narrator, there’s a new novel for you. While “All Fours” resembles an edgy, provocative A24 movie, “Crush” by Ada Calhoun feels like a brainy rom-com that could have been adapted by the late great Nora Ephron. This literary delight of indirect — if not conscious — uncoupling channels the soul of Laurie Colwin’s “Family Happiness” and Ephron’s own “Heartburn.”
Calhoun’s unnamed heroine is a literary powerhouse bursting at the seams. Household breadwinner for her husband, Paul, and teenage son, Nate, she also coordinates all domestic matters for her immediate family as well as her prickly, ailing father. These details echo Calhoun’s own life; as she makes clear in an author’s note, the book began as a memoir before she turned it into fiction.
She’s the portrait of many contemporary women: a hardcore striver who mostly strives to be a responsible adult. “Like all my friends not in the middle of an active crisis, I had settled into something that looked a lot like contentment,” says our heroine. Not an enthusiastic or convincing self-assessment!
“Sometimes, I feel like you’re too good,” Paul tells her, then adds, “It makes me feel bad. You could be a lot more selfish and I wouldn’t mind. I might actually enjoy it.” The boundaries are implied: No emotional affairs, no torrid affairs. Aware that his naturally flirtatious wife never felt kissing was their strong suit, Paul suggests she start kissing other men.
She could “still be ‘good’ even while being ‘bad.’” If you think this is too good to be true, you’re spot on. The reader senses the novel’s conclusion long before the couple accepts their fate. So why dwell in the bardo between marital bliss and separation?
It turns out that the song was right: Breaking up is hard to do. Calhoun’s heroine is determined at all costs to avoid divorce. So deep is her resistance to it that she’s willing to entertain any number of indignities as well as some serious cognitive dissonance. How free can you be when your husband sets the terms of your marginally open marriage? It turns out there’s no way to turn off the faucet when it comes to desire. What follows for our heroine is a flirtatious business trip to London, chased by some unexpected make-out sessions back home. The novel appears to be steering into the territory of highbrow chick lit, rich with cultural references, until one seemingly innocent dalliance flips Paul’s “Polysecure” approved script.
But what becomes abundantly clear is that the true romance at the heart of the book is a recovery of self. Beyond the perfect kiss or soul mate, our heroine aches to seize upon “the best possible version of myself.” We watch our heroine as she reconnects with her college friend David, a buttoned-up professor more comfortable quoting transcendentalists than pop culture. Leaning into the safe medium of email, the two embark upon a correspondence that blossoms into a literary saga. Ephron would be proud. Star-crossed soul mates connect at last. How long can this passionate exchange remain chaste? Calhoun keeps us guessing.
Telescoping away from the sexual tension and intellectual patter that makes this book a delicious escape, one asks what makes novels about divorce and sexual awakening so appealing? There have been any number of reality TV shows and personal essays on the endangered state of matrimony, or monogamy. Some of them were written by Calhoun herself. Just before the COVID-19 pandemic, Calhoun published the best-selling nonfiction work “Why We Can’t Sleep.” After researching and writing a 2017 essay titled “The New Midlife Crisis,” Calhoun connected with hundreds of women to uncover why they’re so exhausted. A common refrain surfaced: Overworked women had little time to consider what they actually wanted. As the years went by, Calhoun wrote an acclaimed memoir and also ended her marriage. Sound familiar?
So why a novel and not a memoir? The answer may be simpler than we think. It’s not enough to document the zeitgeist. If limited imagination and scope are at the root of women’s chronic frustrations, why confine its chronicling to nonfiction?
We need new fables and stories to combat the mythologies and fairy tales we’ve grown up believing. Fiction makes space for the bigger stories, larger ambitions, sweeter conquests, and greater justice.
“Crush” reveals the sly ways we delude ourselves into accepting what’s good enough and the liberating ways we can recover our joie de vivre as well as our autonomy.
CRUSH
By Ada Calhoun
Viking, 288 pages, $30
Lauren LeBlanc is a board member of the National Book Critics Circle.
