Crush by Ada Calhoun: book review
Overview: Unnamed narrator is invited by her husband to start kissing other men. He sells this as opening their marriage in a way that's sexy to him and more fulfilling to her, since she loves kissing and he's never been all that into it. Really, it seems like a bandaid to assuage his feelings about an affair years ago and an excuse for him to eventually start dating other women again too. Instead of giving up on the marriage, she takes him up on this, falls in love with an old friend she reconnects with, and struggles with the entire concept of polyamory, a relationship structure she wanted nothing to do with. While she knows her marriage is basically over, she doesn't want her son to be a child of divorce, so she's willing to try anything. Overall: 3
Characters: 2 I just don't understand this woman... Most women stay in marriages they're unhappy in because they became stay at home mothers and have no prospects of making an income that would keep them in the same lifestyle. They're trapped and unfulfilled. This narrator tries to play it off like she's trapped—but she's not at all. Her husband doesn't have a job because he wants to be an "artist" and has never made a successful go of it in all their decades of marriage. He also doesn't contribute to the running of the household or parenting. She's running herself ragged for a man who contributes nothing financially, to the household, or emotionally. He cheated on her and wants an excuse to date younger women while staying in his very cushy situation. I had a hard time believing her refrain as she became increasingly unhappy that her son, who is getting ready to leave the house for college, being a child of divorce would ruin his life. It makes no sense, and this pattern of thinking makes even less sense at the end of the book when the relationship makes its inevitable conclusion and she just drops this belief out of thin air. Characters are allowed to have misplaced or delusional thoughts that hold them back, but they need to be grounded somewhere. There's not enough interrogation of the belief system over the course of the novel to believe anything that's presented was all that intentionally chosen.
There's a lot of thin air here, which is the major central issue in every aspect of this novel. It's hard to care about a book full of hollow characters. The narrator is impossible to pin down with any traits and not in a waffling towards growth ind of way. Just in a way where it feels like the author forgets the traits she's already given the character. The husband is a cartoon villain in his haplessness mixed with his unreasonable demands and lack of contribution. The son, despite the narrator going on and on about how much she loves kids and wishes she has more, is never meaningfully included in a single scene. The boyfriend that finally gets her to leave the marriage is the Disney movie prince. His biggest flaw is that he's too patient and earnest. Everyone is outrageously one note.
Plot: 3 What is the plot? I'm not sure. The first 2/3 waffle through "I don't want an open relationship," "fine I'll do the open relationship," "hey the way you're doing this isn't fair," "I love my boyfriend so much I'll die without him," "I can't make my child a child of divorce and ruin his life." Rinse and repeat and repeat and repeat with nothing coming out of any cycle. And then eventually this becomes untenable and we start wondering about divorce and rebuilding a life. Weirdly, we end at a writing retreat. The only good glimmer here is an underdeveloped thread about her relationship with her dad that had a lot of hurt and disappointment in it as he dies. The chapter where she spends the day with him before he passes is the most redeeming thing in the entire book, and while it's thin, I happen to have the right life experiences to bring to it to make the skeleton Calhoun set out glow and feel affecting. But the book requires a lot of layering of your own self on top to unearth absolutely anything, and honestly, this thread is so left field of the central narrative and poorly incorporated that I might have cut it for pacing.
Writing: 2 I was so confused when I picked up this book that I had to check the cover and the summary to make sure I'd picked up a novel and not a memoir. It reads like a memoir because it's heavy on summary and reflection, not unlike another book that baffled me and I despised, see: Liars. There are almost no scenes. In a chapter, you might get four lines of dialogue nonconsecutive if you're lucky. We get summaries or ruminations. We never see it unfold, which makes it impossible to get invested. Perhaps this is because Calhoun used her allotment of quotation marks instead to quote literally everyone who's ever existed on this earth. Multiple quotes per page in the most nonsensical ways. Which, at first, I was like, "Maybe this is a memoir." There's quotes being pulled in to prove a thesis. There's very light dialogue because recounting true events accurately is hard. But no! It's sold as fiction! So whether you're pulling from your real life or not, it is definitionally your job to reconstruct the scenes as scenes and make them a story instead of a ramble. I think this comes from two connected places. For one, Calhoun has written a very successful memoir. It's a mode of writing she knows. Also, as I read, I had the sneaking suspicion this was very much autofiction (nothing wrong with that), which was confirmed in the acknowledgements, so I can see where she might have gotten confused and fallen into the memoir mode even though she chose to sell it as fiction or was unable to stray from life enough to fully realize the story. It sounds like she's covered this topic in nonfiction before already, through maybe a less personal lens. In the end, this book's saving grace is that it's fast paced. The lack of general substance here makes it a super quick read, so it's hard to care enough about the glaring issues to put it down.
If you want to read a novel that does an incredible job effortlessly integrating other material/sources/quotations, read Liquid, which also came out this year.
Also, let's talk about the elephant in the room that this feels like All Fours redux. Which, yes, multiple books about polyamory and a midlife crisis of a mother who is also an artist can exist at once, though neither seem to truly be about that, but when one book has done it in such a flashy way, its only natural to compare them. I thought I hated All Fours, but this book has made me give Miranda July a lot more credit. There are scenes that created such visceral pictures in my head that almost a year later I can put myself back into that book. I can see the motel room. And at least there's some action in that book, some rich emotional inner-struggle. I thought driving to the suburbs and having a breakdown in a motel room was pretty bland as far as plot, but it blows this out of the water. Love it or hate it, at least July did something. She wrote a novel. I'm not sure I can honestly call Crush a novel, let alone a successful one. Which sounds really harsh for a book that I was generally indifferent to, if not had a fine time reading. It wasn't an awful reading experience, but I also don't think that Crush was all there, and it could've benefited from a stronger editorial guide for Calhoun's first foray into fiction, no matter how well her previous nonfiction sold or was praised.
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